An Optimal Distributed RES Sizing Strategy in Hybrid Low Voltage Networks Focused on EVs’ Integration

The new era of the energy sector has already begun, and therefore, new challenges need to be tackled. A major challenge that residential distribution grids are going to encounter with the integration of photovoltaic (PV) panels and electric vehicles (EVs) is the unsynchronized new demand and the time-limited production of distributed generation, in combination with space limitations. Therefore, the necessity of energy storage systems (ESSs) is more than evident. ESSs have excessive manufacturing costs, implying that the purchase cost for residential users can be prohibitive. In the present work, a distributed optimal small-scale PV energy system sizing strategy is proposed, by considering the individual energy needs of each residence and their EVs. The strategy is formulated based on the demand of the households and EVs’ charging. By enabling the fuzzy cognitive maps theory, a graph is designed, aiming to establish the correlation among the individual energy parameters and the characteristics of the renewable energy sources (RES). The optimization results reveal that the adopted hybrid approach can reduce the energy cost significantly, up to almost 40%, while enabling distribution system operators (DSOs) to incorporate additional loads, without the need for network expansion. Finally, based on the extracted results, a short discussion about the concept of EVs’ charging by residential RES is presented.