The PVZEN Laboratory for Energy Communities: Monitoring System for Model Identification

This paper describes the PhotoVoltaic Zero Energy Network (PVZEN) laboratory, which is an energy community for research purposes established at the Politecnico di Torino campus. The PVZEN laboratory has three users, each equipped with a PhotoVoltaic (PV) generator, lithium batteries, and utilities. These users are capable of exchanging energy based on specific strategies conceived for maximizing the use of renewable energy sources. This work is mainly focused on the identification of energy models that are able to describe the main components of the community, which are PV generators, power inverters and storage systems. With the aim of providing reliable models that can enable other researchers in simulating the system in different operating conditions, a monitoring system has been installed along the whole plant in order to obtain traceable measurements of electrical and environmental quantities. The reference results provided by the monitoring system allow the measurement device internal to the inverters to be characterised and the effects of measurement uncertainty on the identified models to be evaluated.