Design of District-level Photovoltaic Installations for Optimal Power Production and Economic Benefit

PhotoVoltaic (PV) installations are a widespreadsource of renewable energy, and are quite common urbanbuildings’ roofs. To soften both the initial investment and therecurrent maintenance costs, the current market trends delegatethe construction of PV installations toEnergy Aggregators, i.e.,grouping of consumers and producers that act as a single entityto satisfy local energy demand and to sell the surplus energy tothe grid. In this perspective, PV installations can be designedwith a larger perspective, i.e.,at district level, to maximize powerproduction not of a single building but rather of a number ofblocks of a city. This implies new challenges, including efficientdata management (the covered area can be squared kilometerswide) and optimal PV installation (the number of PV modulescan be in the order of hundreds or even thousands). Thispaper proposes a framework to combine detailed geographic andirradiance information to determine anoptimal PV installationover a district, by maximizing both power production and economicconvenience. Our simulation results run on a real-world districtprove that the framework allows an advanced evaluation of costsand benefit, that can be used by Energy Aggregators to design anew PV installation, and demonstrate an improvement on powergeneration up to 20% w.r.t. standard installations.