President Mana Monitoring Lahaina, Hawaii, United States
Net Energy Metering is being superseded by export limiting interconnection agreements. This trend is typical of grid evolution in the solar interconnection process across the United States as grid saturation increases. To mitigate this in the commercial and industrial (C&I) solar space, either the PV system size must be decreased to match real-time load or coupled with often prohibitively expensive battery energy storage systems (BESS). This study focuses on k-12 educational facilities where the energy usage, or load, is highly variable due to seasonality. The study compares the economic viability of solar+ storage versus solar+ EV chargers (EVSE) as a controllable load. Historic 15-min interval data is used perform comparative analysis between differentiated facilities. Solar output forecast leverages NREL's PVWatts ® software to model solar PV output. Our economic and technical analysis demonstrates that solar+ storage systems are not ideal for educational facilities with significant decrease in electric demand over a long duration, whereas, solar + synchronized level-2 EVSE can provide a viable solution to allow for larger solar PV system size while minimizing on-site solar export to the utility grid.
