Solar panels: what if we reshuffle the cards in energy production?
energy sobriety

If the gains associated with these solutions are already extremely significant, the collaboration of Ricq Architect with the R2D2 home automation workshop on these new issues. The result of its work, in addition to allowing substantial savings, reshuffles the cards between consumers and the historical actors of the sector, thanks to an intelligent management of energy.

The challenge

Energy autonomy is a permanent concern of Ricq Architects. This translates in particular into the installation of solar panels. However, the storage of energy produced by batteries is not yet a financially interesting mature solution, even if the technical progress underway will certainly ensure a bright future for this solution. Thus, at the present time, it is important to have an intelligent management system that allows to juggle, according to the immediate needs, between the use or resale of the solar energy produced by the building and the consumption of the electricity supplied by the institutional actors, Service Industriel de Genève for example. This is what the RCP (Regroupement des Consommations Propres) management system developed by the R2D2 workshop allows.

Practically

This solution requires the maintenance of a global meter for the building. In addition to this meter, which is the property of SIG, R2D2 meters are installed in the homes of each occupant of the building. These meters are METAS-certified and, depending on the case, are rented or sold. Connected by a VPN tunnel to a central computer, they allow, via a remote reading system, to measure the consumption of each dwelling, whether it is electricity supplied by the local producer or that produced by the building’s photovoltaic panels. This makes it possible to easily and accurately establish personalized monthly bills. Finally, thanks to an LED system, each occupant is informed in real time of the origin of the energy being used, for better cost management.

A virtuous system

This agile ROI management principle provides substantial benefits to the different actors. First, when the occupants use the solar energy produced by the building, the price per kWH is lower than the one otherwise charged by GIS. In addition, outside the period of use by the inhabitants, the photovoltaic energy of the building, which cannot currently be stored in an efficient and profitable way, is sold back to GIS at an advantageous rate for it. As an indication, the resale price of the solar energy by the SIG is today 14,27 cts/kWH. Thus, this new way of managing ROI is a virtuous system that can also be applied to the management of gas, heating or hot water consumption.