Robust rooftop photovoltaic planning in energy communities

Abstract

With the increase in the number of rooftop photovoltaic installations worldwide, end users are evolving from pure passive consumers, to more active agents capable to provide generation capacity (prosumers). This aspect becomes especially relevant in energy communities, conceived as groups of prosumers that actuate in a coordinated manner on pursuing common objectives. In this context, properly planning photovoltaic assets becomes crucial for ensuring the efficiency and economic profitability of energy communities. This paper addresses this issue. In particular, a novel rooftop planning tool for energy communities is developed. Unlike to other similar approaches, the new proposal devotes on individual rooftop assets, resulting more suitable to promote incentives to guide individual investments in own assets. The proposed methodology renders as a robust programming approach including a suitable representation of uncertainties via polyhedral envelopes. The resulting model is solved employing the well-known column-and-constraint generation algorithm and profusely tested on a benchmark energy community involved 8 prosumers connected to a 15-bus network. Results serve to validate the new proposal and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, the case study reveals the importance of installing photovoltaic systems, which are capable of reducing the total project cost by 19 %. On the other hand, the role of storage assets is also assessed, showing up that energy arbitrage provided by batteries reduces the project cost by 8 % even in the absence or with limited onsite generation.