Techno-economic analysis of household and community energy storage for residential prosumers with smart appliances

The emergence of Decentralized Energy Resources (DERs) and rising electricity demand are known to cause grid instability. Additionally, recent policy developments indicate a decreased tariff in the future for electricity sold to the grid by households with DERs. Energy Storage Systems (ESS) combined with Demand Side Management (DSM) can improve the self-consumption of Photovoltaic (PV) generated electricity and decrease grid imbalance between supply and demand. Household Energy Storage (HES) and Community Energy Storage (CES) are two promising storage scenarios for residential electricity prosumers. This paper aims to assess and compare the technical and economic feasibility of both HES and CES. To do that, mathematical optimization is used in both scenarios, where a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) schedules the allocation of energy from the PV system, battery and the grid in order to satisfy the power demand of households using a dynamic pricing scheme. The problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) with the objective of minimizing the costs of power received from the grid. Data from real demand and PV generation profiles of 39 households in a pilot project initiated by the Distribution System Operator (DSO) ’Enexis’ in Breda, the Netherlands, is used for the numerical analysis. Results show that the self consumption of PV power is the largest contributor to the savings obtained when using ESS. The implementation of different ESS reduces annual costs by 22–30% and increases the self-consumption of PV power by 23–29%. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed which shows how investment costs of ESS per kWh are crucial in determining the economic feasibility of both systems.