Análisis de sensibilidad económico de un sistema fotovoltaico comunitario en Ciutat Vella - Barcelona

Abstract

In the ineludible current context of climate change, countries like Spain are living intense heat waves. On the other side, geopolitical situations like the Ukraine war have worsened the energy crisis in Europe, increasing electricity prices and accelerating plans to reduce energy dependence. At the same time, these situations have led the emergence of a social problem like energy poverty, which the literature defines as the inability to a attain a socially and materially necessitated level of domestic energy services. In this context, energy communities come like a main tool for the energy transition and reduction of energy poverty, which is a way to empower citizens, making them to take an active part in the change. Energy communities are entities where people are benefited from renewable energy projects. There are several ways to implement them depending on the country and new ways are coming as the regulation advances. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the economic profitability of a photovoltaic energy community simulated in Ciutat Vella – Barcelona under different sharing arrangements. This was made with a sensitivity analysis of partition coefficients of energy and investment. For this energy community, the members considered were public and private users, also incorporating the inclusion of families in energy poverty. This was realized applying the Collective Self- Consumption (CSC) scheme under the Simplified Compensation mechanism defined in the Spanish regulation. To this end, hourly consumption profiles of public, private, and residential users were collected and analyzed. In second place, photovoltaic potential generation was evaluated in the studied place. Then, potential savings for different members of the energy community were calculated according to the scheme of Simplified Compensation applicable to Collective Self- Consumption. Finally, the project economic analysis was performed over eight different scenarios, varying the energy and investment distribution, as well as the number of actors in the energy community. For the evaluation, NTP, IRR and payback time were considered as economic indicators, and saving in electric bills of energy poverty-affected families as a social benefit indicator. From the energy demand analysis, it was observed that the highest consumption occurs in summer, which coincide with peak photovoltaic generation, and it is favorable for the valorization of the generated energy as it promotes direct self-consumption. On the other hand, it was observed that a 100 kWp photovoltaic installation would be undersized to an energy community including an actor with great demand like the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Geography. In addition, it was determined that, for a 100 kWp installation, a partition coefficient of 1% for each family, would translate into a reasonable social benefit. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the project will have higher profitability when surplus energy is minimized, and more energy is assigned to the users with higher energy tariff. Still, the importance to maintain the social benefit in this type of arrangements must not be disregarded, as in energy communities, profit generation is not the final goal. This work concludes that the establishment of this type of community energy projects including public, private, and residential actors from vulnerable contexts are viable. This is said because it is an economically profitable alternative for investors, having the possibility to obtain an NTP of 452.3 k€, IRR of 37.8% and a payback of 2.9 years, while providing benefits to energy poverty families.