Energy Provisioning and Operating Costs in Hybrid Solar-Powered Infrastructure

In this paper, we consider the operating and capital expenditure (CAPEX) costs of solar-powered additions to infrastructure that is operated from the power grid. The CAPEX costs are those associated with provisioning the solar power components, and are selected using an offline design optimization. Once the solar add-on is designed and deployed, the node incurs ongoing operating expenditure (OPEX) costs associated with the purchase of power grid energy. Lower bounds on cost are derived using a linear programming formulation, where the solar power components are sized using historical solar insolation traces and projected loading data. Different node add-on arrangements are considered, which result in various solar/battery and grid configurations. Three energy scheduling algorithms are then introduced to optimize online OPEX costs. A variety of results are presented that show the extent to which a solar-powered add-on can reduce the total cost. These results also show that the proposed algorithms give performance that is close to the lower bounds in many situations.