Transforming Romanian school buildings in prosumers. An opportunity for increasing the energy efficiency in electrical networks and reducing the environmental impact of the power distribution sector

Abstract

In the last decades, electricity systems suffer crucial transformations from integrated networks with a unidirectional flow, to decentralized, bidirectional flow networks. The stakeholders of this large-scale business have changed or improved their role. Electricity distribution companies are becoming service providers and end-users are becoming electricity producers. With the legislation issued in 2018, a new stakeholder was born on the Romanian electricity market, the prosumer. So, the decentralization reached an extreme by giving the smallest end-user the opportunity to become an electricity producer. In the first paragraph of this paper, authors summarize provisions of most recent energy strategies issued by the Romanian Government and the regulatory framework for incentivizing this market player. Given the growing interest of local administration in energy efficiency and pollution reduction, authors consider that schools can play a major role in fulfilling ambitious environmental targets. Most school buildings date from the communist regime and have a rather similar design. In their energy management programmes, municipalities consider energy efficiency in school buildings and authors present the case study of a school in the city of Ploiesti, one of the largest in southern Romania. A brief description of the electricity end-use systems is presented. Before any measure is taken on the supply-side, school’s administration needs to implement the demand-side measures. Next, these measures are investigated, and the results of the technical-economic analysis are presented. In southern Romania, photovoltaic (PV) solutions have better operating conditions and for this case study the solution for local generation with PV panels is presented. In the paper, authors are making an in-depth investigation of extending the prosumers model, with local PV generation on school buildings, over most of Romanian geographical regions. The carbon footprint is calculated, and the environmental benefits of this integrated approach are highlighted.