Modeling and optimization of photovoltaic installations at urban scale
- Autores: Enrique Fuster Palop
- Directores de la Tesis: Jorge Payá Herrero (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de València ( España ) en 2023
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Hatef Madani Larijani (presid.), Carlos J. Sánchez Díaz (secret.), José Sánchez Ramos (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería y Producción Industrial por la Universitat Politècnica de València
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: RiuNet
- Resumen
The building sector in developed countries consumes 20% to 40% of global primary energy, contributing to 30% of the CO2 emissions, a challenge amplified by urban population growth. However, the rising interest in mature renewable energy sources, such as solar photovoltaic (PV), offers opportunities to mitigate these impacts and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits.
The present research investigates the possibilities and constraints in the massive deployment of photovoltaic self-consumption (PVSC) systems in urban areas from an urban planning perspective, considering the current technical and economic limitations. To this end, this thesis employs data-driven strategies to develop both bottom-up physical and agile regression-based models as assessment tools for the technical and economic potential of PVSC systems in urban contexts.
First, an empirical PV production submodel has been developed and validated with climate and production measurements collected from a 50MW utility-scale in operation. Additionally, several improvements in modeling the performance ratio (PR) in low-irradiance environments have been investigated. In the second stage of this research, the previous submodel has been integrated into a physical 3D GIS-based techno-economic model capable of assessing the economic PVSC for a sample of residential buildings. Additionally, the model incorporates shadow modeling and hourly electric demand estimations to assess sample residential buildings. A simulation database, derived from the previous results, has allowed the development of a methodology to train a regression-based model to estimate the production and the economic payback (PB) at a building scale with an assumable accuracy for energy planning purposes. As the last step, the demand submodel was improved by employing real aggregated time series data for multiple consumer patterns and providing realistic estimations for other building typologies. In addition to spatial restrictions, the model optimizes the sizing of the facilities according to their demand and economic constraints, maximizing the relationship between self-sufficiency (SS) and PB. Furthermore, the regression-based methodology has been extended to estimate, besides the payback, multiple key performance indicators such as internal rate of return (IRR), self-consumption rate (SC), and SS. Through an appropriate predictor identification and a training and validation methodology, these correlations allowed performance estimations with an acceptable deviation compared with the physical model. The availability of building-related data is progressively increasing in most countries, enabling widespread application and generalization of the proposed methodologies and reducing the simulation cost of these studies to cover larger urban areas.
As an application of the previous methodologies, a complete-census economic PV potential results of a Mediterranean municipality's building stock was performed under different demand and economic scenarios at a building and municipality scale. For the scenario that meets the current regulation in Spain, the municipality SS ranged between 22%-43% for the most optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, respectively. The optimal sizing of the facilities according to the load curves in the Net Billing (NB) modality is crucial to obtaining competitive economic results. Consequently, the annual PV generation represented 68% of the annual total electricity consumption of the municipality for a net billing scenario, while a net metering scenario represented 103%. Owing to economies of scale and high demand intensity, a higher profitability was found in rooftops of apartment blocks and industrial buildings, which also achieve the highest savings in emissions.
