Fair-Sharing of Battery Energy Storage in Residential Community

Because solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and battery energy storage (BES) have become more affordable and accessible, there has been a significant effort to utilize solar power generation integrated with BES from residential houses. Moreover, community-level solar power generation and shared BES have grown in popularity due to the economies of scale and operational benefits. However, the stochastic nature of fluctuated electricity demand and intermittent solar power generation coupled with the interactions among houses should be considered for the control of shared BES. Furthermore, while shared BES is expected to be more cost-effective than individual one in terms of overall electricity bill of the residential community, it should be guaranteed that individual consumers can also save electricity bill with shared BES compared to when they use their own BES. Therefore, there has been a need for proper control policies that are uniquely designed for shared BES integrated with solar power generation to guarantee that consumers are sharing in a fair manner. This study aims to investigate whether BES can be shared based on residential community setting in an economic and fair fashion using mathematical optimization models. Moreover, the findings and output analysis from this study would be a preliminary results to design and develop a proper control policy for shared BES. In particular, actual residential houses' electricity use and solar power electricity generation data collected from a residential community in New York are analyzed to find underlying patterns and trends. Also, the mathematical optimization models are formulated to investigate optimal operations of shared BES with various parameter settings and scenarios while ensuring fairness in cost-sharing among all participants.