Building To Vehicle To Building concept: a comprehensive energy and economic analysis for European Countries

This paper analyses the energy and economic feasibility of the Building To Vehicle To Building (V2B2) scheme, in which the electricity produced by one building equipped with PV panels is shared to other buildings by means of batteries of plug-in electric vehicles. The proposed approach allows to increase the energy efficiency of buildings toward the nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) goal, obtained by exploiting renewable energy which is not produced on-site. The energy and economic convenience of the proposed approach depends on many boundary conditions, such as the weather (solar radiation on PV panels as well as heating/cooling loads), purchasing/selling electricity costs, possible public incentives. To this aim, a dynamic simulation tool, written in MatLab, was developed to carry out comprehensive feasibility analyses on the whole micro-grid system by varying the related main design and operating parameters (e.g. vehicles patterns, battery capacity, solar field size, etc.). To show the capability of the proposed energy management approach, a comprehensive case study analysis, including a parametric analysis for energy and economic optimization purposes, is presented. The modelled scenarios refer to three energy management schemes including two buildings and an electric vehicle. The energy and economic performance of such schemes are simulated for several European locations to consider the influence of the weather conditions (on which building loads and PV production depend) and the electricity market price. Each simulated scenario is compared to a conventional reference one where the novel energy management scheme is not implemented. A comprehensive parametric analysis is finally carried out to identify the optimal systems configurations, which outperform the reference case performance with respect to energy, economic, and sustainability indicators. Preliminary simulation results show that the proposed V2B2 scheme is capable to maximize the self-production and self-consumption of building integrated renewable energy production up to 50%, reducing the grid electricity importation up to 40%.