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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.
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AutoShare: Virtual community solar and storage for energy sharing
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.
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- PAR ID:
- 10274552
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Energy Informatics
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2520-8942
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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