Abstract: Exploring the operation strategies of energy storages participating in electricity markets and guiding energy storage to actively participate in electric power energy trading can alleviate the contradiction between the power balance and frequency regulation demand in the new power system. Therefore, a self-scheduling strategy of energy storage considering the cycle life and the clearing of the electric power energy-frequency regulation market is proposed. Firstly, aiming at the problem of “zerointeraction state” in the calculation of the cycle life of energy storage, an improved model based on equivalent cycle life（MECL） is designed, which can describe the operation loss of energy storages more accurately. Secondly, according to the improved MECL and the joint clearing rules of electric power energy-frequency regulation market, a double-layer Stackelberg game model is constructed to describe the self-scheduling operation strategy of energy storage. Then, according to the characteristics of the proposed model, the strong duality theorem（SDT）, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker（KKT） conditions and Benders decomposition are used to decompose the model into main-problem and sub-problems for the iterative solution. Finally, through a comparative analysis of various scenarios, it is verified that the self-scheduling operation strategy considering the improved MECL can improve the operation income of the energy storage alliance participating in the electric power energy-frequency regulation market.