Real time performance of solar photovoltaic microgrid in India focusing on self-consumption in institutional buildings

Abstract

Abstract Growth in the Indian PV market has been exponential in the last decade, specifically utility-scale PV. However, rooftop PV sector has seen a sluggish movement due to ambiguity in implementation of various incentives, non-availability of incentives for storage systems, to some extent lack of proper awareness among consumers and inadequate research studies highlighting advantages of roof-top PV. In this paper performance of a rooftop solar photovoltaic microgrid is presented with special emphasis on self-consumption and grid interaction, in the Indian scenario. Energy performance with various energy flow parameters, for a period of one year, is also presented. In contrast to various simulation studies of residential PV systems available, this study is a real time analysis of self-consumption with a low-resolution data from an educational institute. Besides, correlation coefficients between different parameters are also derived. Unlike residential systems, institutional buildings consume mostly when solar energy is available. The results show that the microgrid under study has the highest self-consumption of 89% with battery storage compared to other systems reported across the world. This makes a case for the need of deployment of such microgrids on institutional rooftops, to bridge the gap in reaching the 40\u202fGW roof-top target by 2022 provided appropriate incentives are introduced for the consumers to compensate for the extra cost incurred on storage.