Techno-economic comparison of P2P energy sharing and residential battery storage in the photovoltaic community

Abstract

ABSTRACT To quantify the techno-economic benefits of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and residential battery storage and clarify their inter-relationship, this study proposes four working modes for the PV community with P2P energy sharing and batteries as variables. Besides, the energy flow and electricity cost components are comprehensively quantified at the community and individual customer levels. The yearly simulation results indicate that the batteries and P2P sharing both can increase the community’s self-sufficiency rate (SSR) and self-consumption rate (SCR) by 70–80%. Regarding economics, installing batteries has little effect on average electricity cost (AEC) because of its high cost, while P2P sharing can reduce the AEC by 8.25%. P2P energy sharing combined with battery has the best techno-economicperformance, increasing the SSR and SCR by around 140% and reducing the AEC by 10%, thus is suggested as the optimal mode. In the combined mode, 15% less PV power is stored in batteries than in the only battery storage system, demonstrating that the energy storage role of batteries is not fully exploited. This is because P2P energy sharing is designed to use limited surplus PV power before battery charging. Therefore, the battery size can be reduced to save initial investment in the combined mode.