Maximizing the Benefits of Solar Energy in Smart Energy Communities
Abstract
The first decades of phenomenal growth in the solar industry the focus was on getting more systems installed. Today, with the plummeting costs of photovoltaics, the emphasis in many projects has shifted towards getting as much economic, social and environmental value as possible from the installed systems, and this is increasingly made possible by installations at the community scale. Increasingly individuals, communities and cities are looking to utilize the ability to balance supply and demand with energy storage and controls in local energy micro-grids to maximize the use of locally generated energy within the generating communities. This paper review a range of European projects that aim to manage the production and the consumption of electricity within communities that generate their own energy with renewable energy resources and compares the approaches and results of these projects and discusses what appears to work best at motivating and engaging communities in the orchestration of local energy demand and supply. Building on experiences of community energy projects in South Australia it then provides a summary of the real world market constraints with the related issues of writing lease agreements, models and IP agreements and concludes with a short discussion of the drivers and barriers encountered in the market led model in Australia and in the European research domain of funded research.
Keywords
Smart grid, Demand response, Load energy management, Energy storage.