The increasing reliance on renewable energy generation means that storage may well play a much greater role in the balancing of future electricity systems. We show how heterogeneous stores, differing in capacity and rate constraints, may be optimally, or nearly optimally, scheduled to assist in such balancing, with the aim of minimizing the total imbalance (unserved energy) over any given period of time. It further turns out that in many cases the optimal policies are such that the optimal decision at each point in time is independent of the future evolution of the supply–demand balance in the system, so that these policies remain optimal in a stochastic environment.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘The mathematics of energy systems’.

对可再生能源发电的日益依赖意味着储能在平衡未来电力系统方面可能会发挥更大的作用。我们展示了在容量和速率限制方面不同的异构存储如何被最佳或接近最佳地安排以帮助这种平衡，目的是在任何给定时间段内最小化总不平衡（未提供的能量）。进一步证明，在许多情况下，最优策略是这样的，即每个时间点的最优决策独立于系统中供需平衡的未来演变，因此这些策略在随机环境中保持最优。

这篇文章是主题问题“能量系统的数学”的一部分。