How can flexibility mechanisms reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the residential sector ?

Details

Supervisors

De Jaeger, Emmanuel

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électromécanicien, à finalité spécialisée: énergie

Abstract

Human activities are nowadays recognized by the scientific community as the most important driver of greenhouse gas emissions across the Earth’s surface. As global warming and climate change are becoming increasingly important challenges to tackle, one must find ways to reduce the human’s carbon footprint to strive towards net zero carbon emissions and meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. This work addresses the impact that flexibility mechanisms have on greenhouse gas emissions in the residential sector. More specifically, it tries to determine how the CO2 emissions of a residential consumer vary when dynamic tariffs of electricity are implemented or when self-consumption is performed using photovoltaic panels and a battery. To do so, consumption profiles are submitted to a financial optimization and the emissions are computed using various emission factors and CO2 assessment methods. The study shows that dynamic pricing only has a limited effect on the CO2 emissions because of the losses that occur in the battery. Depending on the situation, these losses can either be greater or smaller than the gains obtained through the flexibility mechanism, leading to small reductions or small increases of the emissions. Photovoltaic self-consumption allows to significantly reduce the emissions because grid-consumed electricity can be replaced by self-produced electricity which releases less emissions.