Performance Comparison Of Self-Consumption For A Photovoltaic System With Battery Storage And Load Management

As the energy consumption in the U.S. continuous to rise, there is a need to install more power plants to supply the energy demand. However, installing more fossil fuel power plants is very harmful to the environment. The rapid growth in photovoltaic (PV) system does contribute in reducing the amount of new power plants, but since its performance relies on weather conditions, this system may not be very reliable on its own. The non-dispatchable nature of PV limits the amount of PV on the current grid. In order to improve this system’s reliability, it is possible to add energy storage and charge it during off peak demand or when there is excess in energy PV generation. Therefore, whenever there is a peak demand, PV power can be combined with battery power to supply the demand. In addition, load management is another technique that can potentially allow PV to satisfy more loads. In this study, performance of a residential PV system with and without storage was studied in order to compare the improvements in self-consumption, meaning a decrease in grid imports/exports. Two different load management schemes were compared.