Abstract
The present work introduces an empirically ground agent-based modeling (ABM) framework to assess the spatial and temporal diffusion of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems on existing buildings of a city district. The overall ABM framework takes into account social, technical, environmental, and economic aspects to evaluate the diffusion of PV technology in the urban context. A city district that includes 18 720 households distributed over 1 290 building blocks and a surface area of 2.47 km2 is used to test the proposed ABM framework. Results show how the underlying regulatory framework (i.e., the rules of the internal electricity market) influences the pattern and intensity of adoption, thus realizing different shares of the available potential. Policies that support the establishment of `prosumers' within Condominiums (i.e., energy community buildings), and not in single-family houses only, is key to yield high diffusion rates. The installed capacity increases by 80% by switching from the one-to-one configuration to the one-to-many paradigm, i.e., from 5.90 MW of rooftop PV installed on single-family households and/or single PV owners to 10.64 MW in energy community buildings. Moreover, the possibility to spread the auto-generated solar electricity over the load profile of the entire population of Condominium results in self-consumption rates greater than 50% and self-sufficiency ratios above 20% for the majority of the simulated buildings.
Highlights
Nowadays more than half of the overall world’s population is living in urban areas
A smart citizen-centric energy system is at the center of the energy transition in Europe and worldwide [5], with citizen-prosumer empowered to participate to the energy market in the role of renewable self-consumers (RSc), jointly acting renewable self-consumers (JSc) or citizen energy communities (CEC) [6]
RESULTS we present the results of the case study in which we investigate the rooftop PV diffusion in a city district under two different policy scenarios
Summary
Nowadays more than half of the overall world’s population is living in urban areas. Projections state that by 2030, urban areas will host around 68% of people globally and one-third of the population will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants [1]. The majority of the consumed energy is still supplied by fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) To engage these issues, the European Union (EU) launched in 2016 the Clean Energy Package [3] for all the Europeans, which is revolutionizing the entire energy system. The new EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) set an ambitious target for 2030 of 32% share of renewable energy in the energy mix and a −40% of greenhouse gases emissions respect to the 1990 levels [4]. In this regard, the electrification of the final uses is the chosen driver for the penetration of distributed renewable energy sources (RES). A smart citizen-centric energy system is at the center of the energy transition in Europe and worldwide [5], with citizen-prosumer empowered to participate to the energy market in the role of renewable self-consumers (RSc), jointly acting renewable self-consumers (JSc) or citizen energy communities (CEC) [6]
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