Enhancing Self-Sufficiency in Buildings with Hybrid PV-Battery Systems and Demand Side Management: A sizing tool

In this paper a sizing tool is proposed for Photovoltaic (PV) and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) in installations with Demand Side Management capability. Three objectives functions are defined, describing the Self-Sufficiency Rate, the Net-Present Value of the investment in PV and BESS, and their combination in a joint expression, respectively. Two analysis methods are developed within the tool to find the optimal solution. The first one applies an exhaustive search by examining all possible combinations of PV and BESS capacity, under pre-defined load shifting. The drawback of this method is the high computational burden due to unnecessary access in the solution space. The second method is implemented with a Particle Swarm optimization (PSO) variant, namely the Unified-PSO. Under this approach, the analysis algorithm is guided in the solution space towards efficient solutions under lower computational time. The comparative assessment of the two methods verifies that via the PSO algorithm the optimal solutions are found under almost half execution time.