Profitability of Photovoltaic and Battery Systems on Municipal Buildings

Abstract: The increasing gap between electricity prices and feed-in tariffs for photovoltaic (PV) electricity in many countries, along with the recent strong cost degression of batteries, led to a rise in installed combined PV and battery systems worldwide. The load profile of a property greatly affects the self-consumption rate and, thus, the profitability of the system. Therefore, insights from analyses of residential applications, which are well studied, cannot simply be transferred to other types of properties. In comparison to residential applications, PV is especially suitable for municipal buildings, due to their better match of demand and supply. In order to analyze the value of additional batteries, municipal PV battery systems of different sizes were simulated, taking load profiles of 101 properties as inputs. It was found that self-consumption differs significantly from households, while different types of municipal buildings are largely similar in terms of the indicators analyzed. The share of electricity consumed during summertime was found to have the most significant impact on the self-consumption rate for most considered system sizes. Due to lower electricity tariffs and lower increases in self-consumption provided through batteries in municipal buildings, the investment into a battery is not economically advantageous in most of the cases considered.