Overview
This Solar Apartments model can be used to model the electrical and financial flows in apartment buildings with shared or individual PV and batteries under a range of business models, including behind the meter installation and aggregation of buiulding loads through an embedded network.
Multi-occupancy buildings currently lag far behind the rest of the residential sector for deployment of PV and batteries. This represents a significant unexploited opportunity for developers as well as for strata bodies of existing buildings, particularly for the low-rise buildings (housing 60% of apartments) where potential rooftop generation likely exceeds common property demand. Where these buildings are also located on feeders with commercial loads, increased PV deployment may also reduce network congestion. Arrangements which apply generation to aggregated building loads can maximise self-consumption, increase financial benefits for consumers and may reduce network constraints, but are rarely implemented because of regulatory and financial barriers. This model will help strata bodies, embedded network operators and other stakeholders to identify optimal organisational arrangements and financial settings to incentivise all owners and residents and thereby increase deployment.
Download the Model
The morePVs model is currently implemented as an open source Python script, which can be found at this github repository.
We are always wanting to improve the model, so if you have any feedback please email any comments and bugs here.