Sharing PV Generation in Apartment Buildings Considering Centralized Energy Storage System

Recent legislation enables electricity consumers in multi-apartment buildings to use electricity generated by their neighbors' solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. The association of several residents with PV production (prosumers) is also allowed, increasing the value of the total installed production capacity, also increasing the scale factor of prosumers. This work explores shared self-consumption in a multi-apartment building, and based on real electricity production and consumption data, an optimization model based on Mixed Integer Linear programming (MILP) was implemented. The main goal was to minimize the electricity consumption costs from the external electrical network of each apartment, maximizing the benefits of non-production consumers in joining the self-consumption program, and maximizing the profits of prosumers. A sensitive analysis of total cost and prosumer/consumer benefit was evaluated. The obtained results show that prosumers and consumers can both have interesting financial benefits for participating in shared PV generation programs.

I. Introduction

Producing and sharing photovoltaic (PV) solar energy with neighbors can be a way to save money and ultimately bet on renewable energy deployment [1]. In most countries, there has been an incentive, whether economic or environmental, for the final consumer in individual production (prosumer) and self-consumption [2]. However, new legislation (Directive (EU) 2018/2001) [3] allows electricity consumers in a neighboring relationship to organize themselves to produce, consume, share, store and sell surplus electricity [4].