Analysis of Rooftop Photovoltaics Diffusion in Energy Community Buildings by a Novel GIS- and Agent-Based Modeling Co-Simulation Platform

Authored by Daniele Salvatore Schiera, Francesco Demetrio Minuto, Lorenzo Bottaccioli, Romano Borchiellini, Andrea Lanzini

Date Published: 2019

DOI: 10.1109/access.2019.2927446

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: UML Other Narrative Flow charts Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The present work introduces an empirically ground agent-based modeling (ABM) framework to assess the spatial and temporal diffusion of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems on existing buildings of a city district. The overall ABM framework takes into account social, technical, environmental, and economic aspects to evaluate the diffusion of PV technology in the urban context. A city district that includes 18 720 households distributed over 1 290 building blocks and a surface area of 2.47 km2 is used to test the proposed ABM framework. Results show how the underlying regulatory framework (i.e., the rules of the internal electricity market) influences the pattern and intensity of adoption, thus realizing different shares of the available potential. Policies that support the establishment of `prosumers' within Condominiums (i.e., energy community buildings), and not in single-family houses only, is key to yield high diffusion rates. The installed capacity increases by 80\% by switching from the one-to-one configuration to the one-to-many paradigm, i.e., from 5.90 MW of rooftop PV installed on single-family households and/or single PV owners to 10.64 MW in energy community buildings. Moreover, the possibility to spread the auto-generated solar electricity over the load profile of the entire population of Condominium results in self-consumption rates greater than 50\% and self-sufficiency ratios above 20\% for the majority of the simulated buildings.
Tags
Agent-based modeling Complex adaptive systems Dynamics Public Policy Innovation Diffusion policy evaluation Consumer Behavior Technology adoption systems Urban areas Sustainable development Barriers Distributed power generation Energy technology diffusion Geospatial analysis Photovoltaic systems Pv adoption