Open AccessPV Self-Consumption and Self-Sufficiency for Household and Office Users: The Lockdown Effects During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Author(s) -
Samuele Branchetti,
C. Petrovich,
Roberto Naldi,
Ilaria Maria Paponetti,
Fabrizio Paolucci,
Giuseppe Nigliaccio
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
international journal of sustainable development and planning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.29
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1743-761X
pISSN - 1743-7601
DOI - 10.18280/ijsdp.170231
Subject(s) - consumption (sociology) , covid-19 , electric energy consumption , production (economics) , pandemic , energy consumption , agricultural economics , business , operations management , environmental science , environmental economics , economics , engineering , electric energy , medicine , electrical engineering , social science , power (physics) , physics , disease , pathology , quantum mechanics , sociology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , macroeconomics
The lockdown period due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent adoption of homeworking had effects also on the energy sector, by shifting electrical consumption from tertiary to residential sector. This article analyzes the electric load curves in the office and at home for a group of employees, estimating the change of the Self-Consumption (SC) and the Self-Sufficiency (SS) when PV plants are installed, during the two months of the lockdown period (2020) with respect to the previous year. This investigation can help to explore the impact of homeworking, which is now usually adopted by many employees. For this purpose, the impact of different PV sizes on SC and SS rates, and the improvements due to the adoption of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), are analyzed. Sizing the PV production equal to the annual consumption and the BESS capacity equal to the difference between the average PV production and the average consumption, the annual SC (=SS in this case) increases from 35% to 68% in households and from 50% to 71% in the office building. The lockdown restrictions increase and decrease these rates of about 5-7 points in households and office building respectively.