Economic Assessment and Business Models of Rooftop Photovoltaic Systems in Multiapartment Buildings: Case Studies for Austria and Germany

Abstract

This paper analyses the profitability and business models of shared, nonsubsidized PV systems' usage in multiapartment buildings in Austria in the context of legislative amendments which came into force in July 2017. In addition, it compares the Austrian results with those of Germany, where significantly higher retail electricity prices determine the profitability benchmark. To that end, a multiobjective optimization model is developed for the optimal dimensioning of PV systems and energy storage facilities in keeping with different end user objectives, ranging from minimizing annual electricity costs to maximizing self-consumption. The results show that the profitability of shared use of nonsubsidized PV systems is marginal in Austria. This means that, based on individual apartment load profiles, the profitability gap ranges between 0 and 40 euros per apartment, whereas the consideration of the building as total load leads to a small cost-saving potential of about 90 euros for the whole building in the best case and thus profitability. In contrast, significant profitability of shared PV systems in multiapartment buildings can be achieved in Germany, where the renewable energy surcharge results in high retail electricity prices. At present, different business models, accounting and billing concepts, are being tested in these countries to learn about the best-practice concepts.

Control Analysis of Building-Integrated Photovoltaic System

“…According to Eqs. (2) and 3, the transfer function between the voltage V c and the current (I L1 À I L2 ) is expressed as follows: The transfer functions given by Eqs. (4) and (5) allow the deduction of the system block diagram given by Figure 6.…”

“…Marwa Ben Saïd-Romdhane 1 *, Sondes Skander-Mustapha 1,2 and Ilhem Slama-Belkhodja 1 © 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen.…”

“…The growth of these installations is due to their environmental advantages in addition to their social and economic benefits. Indeed, since building electricity consumption accounts for a large proportion of a country's overall consumption, and tends to increase further for the coming years, local generation offers an ideal solution [1][2][3][4].…”

Micro-Tracked CPV Can Be Cost Competitive With PV in Behind-The-Meter Applications With Demand Charges

“…Microgrid optimization occurs at three levels (i) control of voltage, current and power, (ii) control of power quality, and (iii) control of scheduling and economics, and a comprehensive review is provided by Meng et al (2016). Focusing here on optimal scheduling and economics, various approaches have been used including: minimizing annual net cost of operation (Azzopardi and Mutale, 2009), minimizing cost of electricity consumed in a commercial building (Marnay et al, 2008;Fina et al, 2017;Mariaud et al, 2017), optimal participation in an energy market (Celli et al, 2005), optimal integration of distributed wind generation into the grid (Zhou and Francois, 2011), optimal management of a rural microgrid (Zhang et al, 2012), optimal PV-battery system for demand charge or peak reduction (Hanna et al, 2014;Khalilpour and Vassallo, 2016;Park and Lappas, 2017;Parra et al, 2017;McLaren et al, 2018;Raoufat et al, 2018), and optimal PV-storage capacity in terms of grid impact and PV utilization rate (Brusco et al, 2016;Merei et al, 2016;Cervantes and Choobineh, 2018;Freitas et al, 2018;Raoufat et al, 2018). These papers focus on PV microgrids.…”

“…Conversely, storage integration yielded financially beneficial results at lower technology cost limits as modeled in McLaren et al (2018), nearly doubled net present value of cash flow in Khalilpour and Vassallo (2016), decreased maximum load by nearly 10% in Hanna et al (2014), supplied energy at 34% less cost than network prices in Park and Lappas (2017), and produced electricity bill savings of up to 12% in Brusco et al (2016). Financial viability of a battery storage with PV microgrid can be impacted by other variables such as electricity retail prices (Fina et al, 2017;Parra et al, 2017), forecasting of solar irradiance (Hanna et al, 2014;Mariaud et al, 2017), and presence of net-metering, which reduced financial benefits gained through storage in McLaren et al (2018), and resulted in a larger optimal PV-battery system size in Cervantes and Choobineh (2018), as compared to no net-metering.…”