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Electricity is one of the key factors for the business of industrial and commercial customers in
a particular location. Therefore, the Government and local authorities have introduced special
tariff schemes to provide electricity in a cost-effective manner. On the other hand, the tariff
structures are focused to reduce the stress for the grid operation by the utility provider.
With the advantage of being a tropical country, Sri Lanka is having higher solar irradiation
throughout the year and most of the electricity consumers are willing to install rooftop solar
systems into their facility. The excess solar production can be sold back to the utility provider
by several methods, as preferred by the consumer.
However, the utility provider is facing many difficulties related to the technical and financial
perspective, to absorb the total solar production by the consumers. Therefore, in this research,
the management of the own solar production by the consumer, either grid connected or in
islanded operation mode, has been speculated.
The research is primarily focused on real-time based management of solar generation which is
allocated for loads, charging, controllable load dispatching, and shedding is decided. Finally,
the load is matched with the available power sources in the basis of optimum cost. As the
optimization technique, quadrature optimization has been used.
A selected industrial purpose customer and a general-purpose customer were used to analyze
the data. Calculation of the unit costs for the solar energy and battery bank was done based on
the LCOE formula and this represents the lifecycle cost of the energy sources based on the
lifetime energy generation. The program is used to calculate the optimum battery capacity for
an industrial and a general-purpose customer in Sri Lanka with the financial values in 2018 as
indicated in annex 7. Also, in both cases the effect of the solar energy generation was varied to
identify the change of the profit of the installations. It could be observed that when reducing
the daily solar power generation, profit was drastically reduced. As an example, in relation to
the data for Case B and Case E when solar generation was reduced by 17% profit was reduced
by 24% for GP customer. Furthermore, the calculations were made to identify the profit
changes for BST which represent the actual cost for the utility in 2018. In this case the average
profit for each case was reduced by 150% ending with a loss for the investment. Also, the
calculation was done for the new financial figures in 2022 November and the profits were
reduced by 330% and the investment is found to be not feasible with the available figures.
n conclusion, the method proposed is feasible to use to evaluate the initial investment for solar
PV systems and battery energy storage (BES) systems. However, the tariff rates as well as the
financial figures like fuel cost, exchange rate formulate a considerable impact on the result.
Therefore, the financial figures provided in 2018 provides a profit generation but in 2022 the
optimized solutions are not feasible due to changes of the financial figures. However, the
method provided in this thesis can be used to calculate feasibility of solar and battery
installation for any customer. |
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