Abstract

A project has been initiated in South Africa to design, model, build, and evaluate an easy to install solar fueled combined heat and power (micro-CHP) system to supply off-grid rural villages and eco-estate communities. This study describes the design of a model that offers a combined 3 kW peak electrical, 12 kW peak thermal, stand-alone solar power technology solution with microgrid storage to deliver power, and heat when the sun is shining and after sunset (at night time). The CHP demand side management system manages power and heat distribution to individual households in a small rural village based on a proposed smart microgrid technology solution. The solution aims to balance the heat/power demand side requirements based on digital feedback on heat/power utilization patterns and user demand. Aspects of the micro-CHP system microgrid control are discussed while a modular smartgrid solution is selected for smart microgrid applications.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-building (V2B) technology permits bypassing the power grid in order to supply power to a building from electric vehicle (EV) batteries in the parking lot. This paper investigates the hypothesis stating that the increasing number of EVs on our roads can be also beneficial for making buildings sustainably greener on account of using V2B technology in conjunction with local photovoltaic (PV) generation. It is assumed that there is no local battery storage other than EVs and that the EV batteries are fully available for driving, so that the EVs batteries must be at the intended state of charge at the departure time announced by the EV driver. Our goal is to exploit the potential of the EV batteries capacity as much as possible in order to permit a large area of solar panels, so that even on sunny days all PV power can be used to supply the building needs or the EV charging at the parking lot. A system architecture and collaboration protocols that account for uncertainties in EV behaviour are proposed. The proposed approach is proven in simulation covering one year period for three locations in different climatic regions of the US, resulting in the electricity bill reductions of 15.8%, 9.1% and 4.9% for California, New Jersey and Alaska, respectively. These results are compared to state-of-the-art research in combining V2B with PV or wind power generation. It is concluded that the achieved electricity bill reductions are superior to the state-of-the-art, because previous work is based on problem formulations that exploit only a part of the potential EV battery capacity. Document type: Article