Energy management of small-scale PV-battery systems: A systematic review considering practical implementation, computational requirements, quality of input data and battery degradation

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares various practical energy management strategies for small-scale PV-battery systems, highlighting that increased sophistication does not always lead to better performance due to modeling assumptions and data uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of seven strategies considering practicality, computational demands, and input data quality, filling a gap in holistic evaluation of PV-battery management.

Findings

More sophisticated strategies do not always outperform simpler ones.

Modeling assumptions significantly impact system performance and economic viability.

Input data quality and battery degradation modeling are critical factors.

Abstract

The home energy management problem has many different facets, including economic viability, data uncertainty and quality of strategy employed. The existing literature in this area focuses on individual aspects of this problem without a detailed, holistic analysis of the results with regards to practicality in implementation. In this paper, we fill this gap by performing a comprehensive comparison of seven different energy management strategies, each with different levels of practicality, sophistication and computational requirements. We analyse the results in the context of these three characteristics, and also critique the modelling assumptions made by each strategy. Our analysis finds that using a more sophisticated energy management strategy may not necessarily improve the performance and economic viability of the PV-battery system due to the effects of modeling assumptions, such as the treatment of uncertainties in the input data and battery degradation effects.