Rooftop Solar Installations for Demand Side Management - A Case Study

Abstract

Renewable energy options, especially solar energy show a strong potential to replace conventional fossil fuel based electricity generation. Demand Side Management is a method of influencing the electricity consumers' demand for electricity and thus reducing the load on distribution and generation companies. With the help of Demand Side Management tools, consumers are able to modify their demand in such a way that installation of new power plants could be avoided. This paper studies the load pattern in the industrial sector of Jalgaon, Maharashtra and their potential for rooftop solar installations. The impact of rooftop solar on the consumption schedule is studied considering the 'Time of Day' (TOD) tariff in place. Further, the importance of storage system is studied by comparing the daily savings for cases with and without storage availability. For the case when battery storage is available, a linear programming based optimization model is used to estimate the maximum possible savings from the installation. To run the optimization, simulation software used is MATLAB.