The purpose of this paper is to provide a method for assessing the impact of direct and indirect flexibilities on the self-consumption of office buildings. The goal is to assess how both the human actors and technical interventions can affect or mitigate deviations in the self-consumption level of a building from its optimal. This paper considers the Predis-MHi platform (a living lab) as a representative case study and applies a Mixed Integer Linear Programming optimization to manage both the direct (stationary battery charging) and indirect flexibilities (Electric Vehicle charging when users plug and unplug their vehicles). Our results indicate that the potential for a building’s self-consumption improvement using indirect flexibilities does exist and can be quantified. However, this type of flexibility is highly dependent on human actors which presents a high level of uncertainty and is difficult to account for in all stages of a building’s development and use. Direct flexibilities such as stationary battery storage can be used to mitigate the undesired effects of having significant levels of indirect flexibilities on a tertiary sector building’s energy performance. The results from this study could potentially be modeled into an indicator, which would serve to influence occupant behavior towards a desired optimal.
Purpose
This paper aims to consider both the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and behavioural response in the optimal sizing of solar photovoltaic systems (PV modules and batteries) for energy communities. The objective is to achieve a high self-sufficiency rate whilst taking into account the grid carbon intensity and the global warming potential of system components.
Design/methodology/approach
Operation and sizing of energy communities leads to optimization problems spanning across multiple timescales. To compute the optimisation in a reasonable time, the authors first apply a simulation periods reduction using a clustering approach, before solving a linear programming problem.
Findings
The results show that the minimum GHG emissions is achieved for self-sufficiency rates of 19% in France and 50% in Germany.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis is restricted to specific residential profiles: further work will focus on exploring different types of consumption profiles.
Practical implications
This paper provides relevant self-sufficiency orders of magnitude for energy communities.
Originality/value
This paper combines various approaches in a single use case: environmental considerations, behavioural response as well as multi-year energy system sizing.
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