An official website of the United States government
Abstract Residential solar installations are becoming increasingly popular among homeowners. However, renters and homeowners living in shared buildings cannot go solar as they do not own the shared spaces. Community-owned solar arrays and energy storage have emerged as a solution, which enables ownership even when they do not own the property or roof. However, such community-owned systems do not allow individuals to control their share for optimizing a home’s electricity bill. To overcome this limitation, inspired by the concept of virtualization in operating systems, we propose virtual community-owned solar and storage—a logical abstraction to allow individuals to independently control their share of the system. We argue that such individual control can benefit all owners and reduce their reliance on grid power. We present mechanisms and algorithms to provide a virtual solar and battery abstraction to users and understand their cost benefits. In doing so, our comparison with a traditional community-owned system shows that our AutoShare approach can achieve the same global savings of 43% while providing independent control of the virtual system. Further, we show that independent energy sharing through virtualization provides an additional 8% increase in savings to individual owners.
more »
« less
vSolar: Virtualizing Community Solar and Storage for Energy Sharing
Since many residential locations are unsuitable for solar deployments due to space constraints, community-owned solar arrays with energy storage that are collectively shared by a group of homes have emerged as a solution. However, such a group-owned system does not allow individual control over how the electricity generation from the solar array and energy stored in the battery is used for optimizing a home's electricity bill. To overcome this limitation, we propose vSolar, a technique that virtualizes community solar and battery arrays such that each virtual system can be independently controlled, regardless of others. Further, we present mechanisms and algorithms that allow homes with surplus energy to lend to homes with deficit energy.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10062541
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 178 to 182
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In this paper, we consider the problem of operating a battery storage unit in a home with a rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system so as to minimize expected long-run electricity costs under uncertain electricity usage, PV generation, and electricity prices. Solving this dynamic program using standard techniques is computationally burdensome, and is often complicated by the difficulty of estimating conditional distributions from sparse data. To overcome these challenges, we implement a data-driven dynamic programming (DDP) algorithm that uses historical data observations to generate empirical conditional distributions and approximate the cost-to-go function. Then, we formulate two robust data-driven dynamic programming (RDDP) algorithms that consider the worst-case expected cost over a set of conditional distributions centered at the empirical distribution, and within a given Chi-square or Wasserstein distance, respectively. We test our algorithms using data from homes with rooftop PV in Austin, Texas. Numerical results reveal that DDP and RDDP outperform common existing methods with acceptable computational effort. Finally, we show that implementation of these superior operational algorithms significantly raises the break-even battery cost under which a homeowner is incentivized to invest in a residential battery rather than participate in a feed-in tariff or net energy metering program.more » « less
-
As solar electricity has become cheaper than the retail electricity price, residential consumers are trying to reduce costs by meeting more demand using solar energy. One way to achieve this is to invest in the solar infrastructure collaboratively. When houses form a coalition, houses with high solar potential or surplus roof capacity can install more panels and share the generated solar energy with others, lowering the total cost. Fair sharing of the resulting cost savings across the houses is crucial to prevent the coalition from breaking. However, estimating the fair share of each house is complex as houses contribute different amounts of generation and demand in the coalition, and rooftop solar generation across houses with similar roof capacities can vary widely. In this paper, we present HeliosFair, a system that minimizes the total electricity costs of a community that shares solar energy and then uses Shapley values to fairly distribute the cost savings thus obtained. Using real-world data, we show that the joint CapEx and OpEx electricity costs of a community sharing solar can be reduced by 12.7% on average (11.3% on average with roof capacity constraints) over houses installing solar energy individually. Our Shapley-value-based approach can fairly distribute these savings across houses based on their contributions towards cost reduction, while commonly used ad hoc approaches are unfair under many scenarios. HeliosFair is also the first work to consider practical constraints such as the difference in solar potential across houses, rooftop capacity and weight of solar panels, making it deployable in practice.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract Objectives: To determine if solar-powered battery systems could be successfully used for electricity-dependent medical devices by families during a power outage. Methods: We assessed the use of and satisfaction with solar-powered battery systems distributed to 15 families following Hurricane Maria in rural Puerto Rico. Interviews were conducted in July 2018, 3 mo following distribution of the systems. Results: The solar-powered battery systems powered refrigeration for medications and prescribed diets, asthma therapy, inflatable mattresses to prevent bedsores, and continuous positive airway pressure machines for sleep apnea. Despite some system problems, such as inadequate power, defective cables, and blown fuses, families successfully dealt with these issues with some outside help. Almost all families were pleased with the systems and a majority would recommend solar-powered battery systems to a neighbor. Conclusions: Families accepted and successfully used solar-powered battery systems to power medical devices. Solar-powered battery systems should be considered as alternatives to generators for power outages after hurricanes and other disasters. Additional research and analysis are needed to inform policy on increasing access to such systems.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract While solar power systems have offered a wide variety of electricity generation approaches including photovoltaics, solar thermal power systems, and solar thermoelectric generators, the ability to generate electricity at both the daytime and nighttime with no necessity of energy storage remains challenging. Here, we propose and verify an environment-friendly, sustainable, and cost-effective strategy of harvesting solar energy by solar heating during the daytime and harnessing the coldness of the outer space through radiative cooling to produce electricity at night using a commercial thermoelectric module. It enables electricity generation for 24 h a day. We experimentally demonstrate a peak power density of 37 mW/m $$^2$$ 2 at night and a peak value of 723 mW/m $$^2$$ 2 during the daytime. A theoretical model that accurately predicts the performance of the device is developed and validated. The feature of 24-h electricity generation shows great potential energy applications of off-grid and battery-free lighting and sensing.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3208903.3208932
