Optimal regulation of flexible loads in rural residential buildings considering mobile batteries: A case study in Shaanxi Province

While the grid-connected capacity of rural household photovoltaics is increasing rapidly, achieving dynamic supply-demand matching despite fluctuations in solar energy is challenging. With the rapid development of rural electrification, battery-powered technologies, such as electric vehicles and electric agricultural machinery, are becoming increasingly popular in rural areas. In this context, utilizing idle mobile batteries to assist in energy storage for rural residential buildings offers a new way to solve the problem of dynamic supply-demand matching. In this study, a field survey was conducted on several typical fruit-growing villages in the Central Shaanxi Plain in Shaanxi Province of China. Typical rural households were selected to calculate the electricity loads of the residential buildings, with due consideration to the intervention of mobile batteries. Under the premise of installing 3 kW household photovoltaic systems in rural households, an economical efficiency-oriented model was built for the optimal regulation of flexible loads. The results were compared in the context of two patterns of electricity consumption, i.e., unidirectional charging of mobile batteries from buildings and bidirectional charging and discharging between mobile batteries and buildings. The bidirectional pattern significantly increased the photovoltaic consumption of typical rural households on various typical days. Specifically, during both scenarios of not implementing time-of-use and implementing time-of-use, the typical day of the winter slack farming season exhibited the best photovoltaic consumption effect among all types of typical days. Additionally, the bidirectional pattern also result in a significant increase in the annual electricity sales revenues for typical rural households.