Economic Comparison of Photovoltaic Energy Storage Systems for Different Load Profiles: A Case Study

Photovoltaic energy storage systems(PV ESS), which use energy storage to address the intermittent nature of PV, have been developed to utilize PV more efficiently to lower grid carbon emissions and to mitigate the peak load pressure of distribution network. Due to the significant temporal impact of photovoltaic, the operation of photovoltaic energy storage systems might highly related to the temporal characteristics of the given load profile; however, there is lack of research on the economic impact of the load profiles on the photovoltaic energy storage systems. To fill this gap, an economic comparison is conducted to evaluate the cost-benefit of photovoltaic energy storage systems for different load profiles from a perspective of large industrial consumers in this paper. A method for sizing the capacity of photovoltaic and energy storage based on a given load profile is proposed, and an economic evaluation model considering the cost-benefit of the investment and operation of photovoltaic and energy storage system, as well as the reduction of distribution transformer capacity is proposed. The proposed model is implemented to two typical load profiles in a case study, and the results show the importance of load shapes for matching PV energy storage systems.