The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of smart working: the working activity carried out also outside the office and not only at the office. This has interesting consequences also on the energy sector, since it can decrease commuting consumption and shifts electric consumption from the tertiary to domestic sector. In this work the electric consumption performance of a (representative) group of 10 employees, working with classical office equipment, has been investigated. The variation of the electric load curves has been analyzed in the office and at home before, during and after the 2020 lockdown restrictions introduced by the Italian government. Consumption changes, with respect to the previous year, have been analyzed and discussed. The variations of the electric load curves affect, in case of adoption of PV (photovoltaic) panels, PV self-sufficiency and PV self-consumption. In the case considered, while the former does not vary significantly (with values of about 40-50%), the latter decreases, in case of the office building, from 44% to 24% and it increases, in case of households, from 32% to 50%. These consequences have to be taken into account when programming new PV plant installations.
The lockdown period due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent adoption of homeworking had effects also on the energy sector, by shifting electrical consumption from tertiary to residential sector. This article analyzes the electric load curves in the office and at home for a group of employees, estimating the change of the Self-Consumption (SC) and the Self-Sufficiency (SS) when PV plants are installed, during the two months of the lockdown period (2020) with respect to the previous year. This investigation can help to explore the impact of homeworking, which is now usually adopted by many employees. For this purpose, the impact of different PV sizes on SC and SS rates, and the improvements due to the adoption of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), are analyzed. Sizing the PV production equal to the annual consumption and the BESS capacity equal to the difference between the average PV production and the average consumption, the annual SC (=SS in this case) increases from 35% to 68% in households and from 50% to 71% in the office building. The lockdown restrictions increase and decrease these rates of about 5-7 points in households and office building respectively.
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