AutoShare: Virtual community solar and storage for energy sharing

Energy Informatics

article

Lee, Stephen¹  Shenoy, Prashant²  Ramamritham, Krithi³  Irwin, David² 

[1] Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh;College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts;Indian Institute of Technology

关键词: Energy systems;    Storage;    Solar;    Energy sharing;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s42162-021-00144-w

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY