HeliosFair: Fair Sharing of Solar Energy Costs in Communities
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Title
BuildSys 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation
Publication Date
10-29-2024
Abstract
As solar electricity has become cheaper than the retail electricity price, residential consumers are trying to reduce costs by meeting more demand using solar energy. One way to achieve this is to invest in the solar infrastructure collaboratively. When houses form a coalition, houses with high solar potential or surplus roof capacity can install more panels and share the generated solar energy with others, lowering the total cost. Fair sharing of the resulting cost savings across the houses is crucial to prevent the coalition from breaking. However, estimating the fair share of each house is complex as houses contribute different amounts of generation and demand in the coalition, and rooftop solar generation across houses with similar roof capacities can vary widely. In this paper, we present HeliosFair, a system that minimizes the total electricity costs of a community that shares solar energy and then uses Shapley values to fairly distribute the cost savings thus obtained. Using real-world data, we show that the joint CapEx and OpEx electricity costs of a community sharing solar can be reduced by 12.7% on average (11.3% on average with roof capacity constraints) over houses installing solar energy individually. Our Shapley-value-based approach can fairly distribute these savings across houses based on their contributions towards cost reduction, while commonly used ad hoc approaches are unfair under many scenarios. HeliosFair is also the first work to consider practical constraints such as the difference in solar potential across houses, rooftop capacity and weight of solar panels, making it deployable in practice.
First Page
164
Last Page
168
DOI
10.1145/3671127.3698175
Recommended Citation
Maji, D., Gupta, V., Shenoy, P., & Sitaraman, R. (2024). HeliosFair: Fair Sharing of Solar Energy Costs in Communities. BuildSys 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation, 164-168. https://doi.org/10.1145/3671127.3698175
ISBN
[9798400707063]
