Peak Shaving with Bifacial Solar PV: Simulated Storage Battery Dispatch for Electric Vehicle Charging

Electric load peak shaving is a challenging and important problem considering the rapid growth of high-power electric vehicle charging sites. This novel study models vertically- oriented and West-facing bifacial solar photovoltaic modules to increase late afternoon production, and simulates peak shaving using a storage battery system. With occasional evening load peaks and a retail electric tariff with a 16:00-21:00 peak time of use period, this late afternoon production aligns both with load and with higher electric prices. Exploiting this, an electric load peak shaving simulator dispatches a stationary battery using a threshold-based approach, where the thresholds are optimized by a Newton-Raphson-based gradient descent method. The optimizer is verified to be within 0.1 kW. Five case studies and a sensitivity analysis on battery energy capacity and solar array configuration are considered. Relative to the base case, a total retail electric cost reduction of 1422 (6.7%) is achieved with a modest battery size of 25 kWh.