Economic and environmental evaluations of photovoltaic installations for self-consumption in industrial energy communities

In order to limit climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energies are increasingly being used to replace fossil energy resources such as gas, coal, and oil. To accelerate this energy transition, energy communities are encouraging factories to share and use renewable energy sources in a collective self-consumption framework. This article presents a configuration of photovoltaic self-consumption in an energy community that combines collective and individual self-consumption. A bi-objective mathematical model has been proposed for this configuration to minimize energy costs and CO2 emissions. To achieve a trade-off between these two goals, two methods are used to solve this problem by converting the bi-objective problem into a single objective: the weighted sum method (WSM) and an algorithm based on the 6-constraint method. The performance of these two methods is evaluated using several numerical experiments. The results show that WSM gives the minimum average value (2.8026%) for the summation of the gap between the obtained objectives for each goal and their optimal values when they are considered separately. Moreover, this method yields the smallest gap value (1.3071%) compared to the 6-constraint method. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.