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.
The energy transition is a multidisciplinary challenge that warrants solutions that are robust and sustainable. Energy flexibility, one of the key pillars of the energy transition, is an umbrella term that covers multiple innovative solutions implemented at all levels of the electric grid to ensure power quality standards, amongst other objectives. Low-tech, on the other hand, emphasizes designing, producing, and sustainably implementing solutions. Therefore, considering the multidisciplinary nature of energy transition and the existing energy flexibility solutions, the purpose of this research work is multilateral: first, it presents the concept of low-tech and its associated mechanisms; then, it addresses the misconceptions and similarities that low-tech might have with other innovation approaches; and finally, it provides an assessment of existing flexibility solutions using low-tech as a tool. The result of this assessment is presented qualitatively and indicates that indirect energy flexibility solutions rank higher on a low-tech scale relative to supply-side energy flexibility solutions and energy storage flexibility solutions.
Are more solar panels always better in terms of carbon influence of a local energy community, and what is the impact of energy sufficiency? The answer is simple when the national electrical grid is taken as an infinite source of storage. However, this answer becomes more uncertain if we consider that exporting power to a larger grid at the national scale is not a desired option. Although this is a conservative hypothesis, it is considered for technical and social reasons. In doing so, load profiles become a key to evaluating the carbon impact of hybrid systems with solar panels plus storage units. To summarize the impact of any load profiles on the optimal sizing of solar panels, we propose a novel index denoted ‘natural self-sufficiency’. Our results show that not only reducing energy demand but also being more flexible significantly affects the carbon emissions related to solar panels.
This article proposes a method for taking into account the indirect flexibility (charging of Electric Vehicles) available in buildings for the sizing of stationary battery storage systems (direct flexibility). A Linear Programming approach was applied to data sourced from the Predis-MHI platform (a living lab) such that the day-to-day charging of EVs, as well as the scheduling of the charging and discharging of the proposed battery, were optimized whilst simultaneously dimensioning the battery capacity.Our results indicate that based on the percentage increase in self-consumption with reference to the base case, it is possible to reduce the battery capacity required by up to 100% as compared to a methodology that doesn't account for the indirect flexibility. Whilst relevant, the sizing approach proposed in this article assumes optimal human behavior, which is usually difficult to achieve. Our proposed approach can be adapted and used for the dimensioning of direct flexibilities for both residential and commercial/public buildings.
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