Electricity Cost Reduction of Industrial/General Purpose Customers in Sri Lanka using Solar PV and Battery Storage

Abstract

Many solar installations are coming up to harness solar electricity in Sri Lanka, including on rooftops. Since the Industrial and Commercial customers are crucial for the economic activities, utility providers have introduced several tariff schemes for financial motivation to go for Solarphotovoltaics. However, with rooftop Solar PV systems, the management of excess solar generation has become a challenge for the utility provider who shed the excess solar generation to regulate the grid parameters. As a result, return of investment for the rooftop solar systems has been reduced drastically for industrial purpose(IP) and general purpose (GP) customers in Sri Lanka. The real time management of the PV generation can be conducted with the available Loads and the other generating sources, like Diesel Engines and Battery Storage. The maximum demand cost needs to be considered and the unit costs can be calculated based on the LCOE technique to reflect the lifetime costs of each source and optimization technique can be used to dispatch the generation and loads based on the optimum cost. In this paper, the PV generation optimization of Industrial Purpose/ General Purpose customers has been conducted using quadratic optimization technique to reduce the electricity cost. The results of the study show that for two selected GP and IP consumers, the program derives the optimum size of battery capacity for a given installation and the minimum solar generation requirement for the economic benefit.