In this paper, a centralized management mechanism is presented for cloud energy storage (CES), which is a new competitor to distributed energy storage (DES). In the CES, a central energy storage is installed by an investor and the consumers can rent portions of the CES capacity according to their needs. The investor's revenue includes the received rent from the consumers. In the proposed model, the investor of CES ensures that the annual cost of the consumers is less than the DES approach. The consumers are therefore encouraged to participate in the CES mechanism. IEEE 33-bus distribution network is assumed as a case study, and it is simulated under three cases: the network without storage, the network with DES approach, and the network with CES approach. The simulation results verify that the CES improves the well-being of the consumers compared to the DES approach. In the CES, the annual cost of the consumers decreases by 6 % and 4.48 % compared to cases 1 and 2, respectively. The return on investment is less than 3 years, with a projected lifespan of 10 years. The CES decreases the purchased power from the upstream network by 1.4 % compared to the DES. It is demonstrated that the renting cost of the CES services is between 49 % and 56 % of the investment cost in the DES approach. In addition, a conceptual comparison is made between CES and centralized energy storage (CENES) systems. Simulation results show that while investment cost is reduced by 6.1 % in the CENES approach, revenue and profit decrease by 35 % and 38 % respectively. The return on investment for CENES is approximately 44 months, whereas for CES, it is approximately 28 months.
