Profitability of photovoltaic and battery systems on municipal buildings

Abstract

The increasing gap between electricity prices and feed-in tariffs for photovoltaic (PV) electricity in many countries, along with the recent strong cost degression of batteries, led to a rise in installed combined PV and battery systems worldwide. The load profile of a property greatly affects the self-consumption rate and, thus, the profitability of the system. Therefore, insights from analyses of residential applications, which are well studied, cannot simply be transferred to other types of properties. In comparison to residential applications, PV is especially suitable for municipal buildings, due to their better match of demand and supply. In order to analyze the value of additional batteries, municipal PV battery systems of different sizes were simulated, taking load profiles of 101 properties as inputs. It was found that self-consumption differs significantly from households, while different types of municipal buildings are largely similar in terms of the indicators analyzed. The share of electricity consumed during summertime was found to have the most significant impact on the self-consumption rate for most considered system sizes. Due to lower electricity tariffs and lower increases in self-consumption provided through batteries in municipal buildings, the investment into a battery is not economically advantageous in most of the cases considered.

Machine learning for performance prediction in smart buildings: Photovoltaic self-consumption and life cycle cost optimization

“…Moreover, the significant decline in the market price of PV systems (López Prol & Steininger, 2020) leads to its large-scale installation worldwide which has made it the second-leading absolute growth of all renewable sources so far (Del Pero et al, 2021). Nevertheless, in the countries where the grid parity for PV power plants has already been reached, improving self-consumption is known as the main driver for the profitability of photovoltaic systems (Hirschburger & Weidlich, 2020). Enhancing PV selfconsumption yields substantial economic profits and becomes of paramount importance due to its potential in improving the environmental performance and grid stability by reducing peakpower injection to the electricity grid as well as lowering the grid-supplied electricity consumption (Ahmadiahangar et al, 2022).…”