Sizing of Rooftop PV Array and Community-Run Battery Storage for an Energy Cooperative in Prosumer Cluster

A standalone system can address the problem of uncovered electricity from the grid. The cost of energy storage for installing renewable energy systems is one of the issues of such a system. This paper introduces and investigates the optimal capacity of a novel energy cooperative system with prosumer clusters and a community battery bank as typical energy storage. The system’s function is formulated to minimize the investor’s annual expenditure. The proposed energy cooperative system uses actual annual solar insolation data and the electric load demand of houses in the optimization process. The model, as mentioned above, is applied to two system configurations – energy cooperative without and with Prosumer to Prosumer (P2P) energy sharing. The reliability factor Loss of Power Supply Probability (LPSP) from the Cooperative Energy Sharing algorithm is taken as a constraint in the formulation. The comparison of the two configurations brings out the importance of P2P energy sharing in a standalone Energy Cooperative system. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to achieve this optimization. The PSO results show that the proposed Energy Cooperative configurations are promising to facilitate the system’s reliability.