EnergyMatching Tool
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The EnergyMatching Tool
The EnergyMatching Tool is at disposal on the EnergyMatching Platform to support designers and other professionals who want to integrate a photovoltaic system in a building or in a district. Developed for the early design phase, the tool suggests preliminary configurations of the system (capacity and position of the photovoltaic modules plus capacity of the electric storage). The configurations are optimized according to the specificities of the cases.
Energy-Matching and other inputs
The tool is based on the “energy-matching” between building consumption and photovoltaic production, evaluating the quantity of electric energy that is directly self-consumed. The energy-matching is optimized by an algorithm which suggests the photovoltaic configuration most suitable according to the selected objective (economy, energy or environment-targeted). Over than the building consumption, the tool considers a set of other inputs: geometry of the buildings, surfaces available for photovoltaic installation, weather conditions, shading effect of close and far objects, technologies’ features (e.g. costs, dimensions, efficiency, degradation), cost of electricity bought and sold to the grid.
Application on real-life studies
The EnergyMatching Tool was applied to the project demo buildings (Italian, French, Swedish), providing a preliminary design of the photovoltaic systems. It suggested the optimal configurations and gave a precious insight in the systems’ expected performance. A set of Key Performance Indicators are provided (e.g. energy self-consumed, coverage of energy demand, payback time, Net Present Value, Levelized Cost of Electricity, CO2 emissions). They supported the following phase of detailed design of the photovoltaic systems, dealing with many other aspects related to the architectural design, regulations, installation works, etc.
