Economic and environmental impact of lead-acid batteries in grid-connected domestic PV systems

By E. McKenna, Marcelle C. McManus, S. Cooper, M. Thomson. 2013

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Occupants of dwellings with grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems can often benefit financially from exporting electricity to the grid. When export prices are lower than import prices, however, occupants are incentivised to time-shift demand in order to avoid exports and reduce imports. To maximise this potential financial benefit, the addition of batteries to the PV system has been proposed to take advantage of the specific commercial opportunity presented to the occupant of trading exported power during the day for imported power during the evening. This paper therefore assesses the economic and environmental impact of the use of lead-acid batteries in grid-connected PV systems under current feed-in tariff arrangements in the UK. The development of a lead-acid battery model is described, which is used to simulate hypothetical power flows using measured data on domestic PV systems in the UK. The simulation results indicate that the net benefit of the battery is negative, even when considering an idealised lossless battery. When realistic energy losses and lifetimes are accounted for, the financial loss for the systems considered here can approach £1000/year. The environmental impact of the use and production of the lead-acid battery is also described, and also found to be negative, further strengthening the argument against the use of lead-acid batteries in domestic grid-connected PV systems.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28b78f217afdb12635704b8f4bc3fb905af2dc3c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Kotub Uddin
2. James Marco
3. D. Parra
4. Adisa Azapagic
5. Rebecca Gough
6. Paul A. Jennings

In Pollution

1. Danny Rigby
2. Adisa Azapagic
3. P. Balcombe

Citations in the corpus

• Optimum community energy storage system for demand load shifting (2016, background): “Since lead-acid (PbA) batteries are the most mature battery technology on the market and lithium-ion (Li-ion) is the most promising technology at the moment, both technologies are compared in the analysis and this adds value regarding previous studies which focused on a specific technology [14,19] o”
• Techno-economic analysis of the viability of residential photovoltaic systems using lithium-ion batteries for energy storage in the United Kingdom (2017, background): “[50] found the overall environmental impact of lead-acid batteries to be negative.”
• Energy self-sufficiency, grid demand variability and consumer costs: Integrating solar PV, Stirling engine CHP and battery storage (2015, background): “Batteries are currently not cost effective [12], although smaller capacity systems are perhaps close to being so [13–15], particularly lead-acid batteries [16].”