The growing penetration of photovoltaic (PV) generation and battery energy storage systems (ESS) in grid-connected applications has heightened the need for design and operational strategies that address technical performance, economic viability, and long-term system sustainability. Conventional multi-objective optimisation frameworks for PV–ESS systems typically ignore component degradation or treat it as an exogenous post-processing step, resulting in suboptimal solutions over the system lifetime. This paper embeds physics-informed battery ageing and grid constraints within the NSGA-II optimisation loop to co-optimise Net Present Cost (NPC), reliability (Energy Not Supplied and Loss of Power Supply Probability), curtailment, and battery State-of-Health. Across three regions (Nigeria, South Africa, India), the lifecycle-aware design reduces NPC by 12–15% and slows degradation by 38–41%, extending replacement intervals to 10–12 years while maintaining grid-code compliance. The framework integrates realistic battery ageing models, energy balance constraints, and grid interaction limits, ensuring physical feasibility and long-term performance consistency. Validation across Nigeria, South Africa, and India under varying climatic and tariff conditions shows that integrating degradation awareness fundamentally alters optimal sizing and dispatch decisions, yielding solutions with improved lifecycle reliability and lower total cost of ownership than conventional approaches. The results confirm that lifecycle-aware optimisation is essential for the sustainable deployment of grid-connected PV–ESS systems and provide practical findings for system planners, utilities, and policymakers seeking to improve long-term grid resilience.
Areola et al. (2026) studied this question.