Giving a profile for the Grid Power Limit, instead of a fixed value

[julmou]

Good day,

I came up with this idea from the Storage section of a project, where we define the Storage Strategy, in this particular case a Peak Shaving strategy.

We have to give the Grid power limit for the peak shaving, see below:

I think it would be very useful to be able to insert a Grid power limit profile instead of a single value. In the same manner we can give a profile of the grid unavailability with the Weak Grid strategy, or a yearly profile of the tariff in the Economic Eval. section.

This would be great for the Storage Peak Shaving strategy, but it could also be applied to a non-storage system, where the grid limit fluctuates.

To give a practical example: the grid (admittedly weak, old and very "linear" instead of star-shaped) in Australia is very congested, especially with all the private-household solar systems contributing during the sunny part of the days. So the grid authority can give order to a newly built solar farm to stay at a low injection point (Hold Point Test) for a long time (e.g. a 100MW SF limited at 20MW), but then agreements can be reached where the SF can produce, say up to 50MW during certain hours, but no more than 20MW during others, or be allowed to produce normally during most of the year, but be limited at 80MW only during summer time).

-> for these reasons, I definitely think being able to incorporate a Grid Power limit profile in the simulations would be useful.

More and more developers are seriously balancing the pros and cons of adding a storage to their project now, because the waiting time for being allowed to produce the max. power can be so long here, that it can be worth having a battery that can re-inject from 5pm for the whole evening, the extra energy it couldn't inject during the day. But then, the strategy would change from the time the max. power is allowed (albeit still using the battery to maximize best time of day to inject etc, but with more room for options). Anyway, in this example, the project would have a Grid Power Limit for like 6 months and then no power limit -> therefore being able to incorporate a yearly profile for the grid power limit would allow us to simulate how a first year of operation would actually look like, and get the financial perspective of that year. Then the next 19 years can be simulated separately without grid power limit.

Let me know what you think, and if it's a feasible PVsyst improvement.

Regards,

Julien

[André Mermoud]

Yes indeed. providing an hourly definition of the Grid limitation is on our roadmap.  However I don't know when we will be able to develop this feature.