Residential solar installations are becoming increasingly popular among homeowners. However, renters and homeowners living in shared buildings cannot go solar as they do not own the shared spaces. Community-owned solar arrays and energy storage have emerged as a solution, which enables ownership even when they do not own the property or roof. However, such community-owned systems do not allow individuals to control their share for optimizing a home’s electricity bill. To overcome this limitation, inspired by the concept of virtualization in operating systems, we propose virtual community-owned solar and storage—a logical abstraction to allow individuals to independently control their share of the system. We argue that such individual control can benefit all owners and reduce their reliance on grid power. We present mechanisms and algorithms to provide a virtual solar and battery abstraction to users and understand their cost benefits. In doing so, our comparison with a traditional community-owned system shows that our AutoShare approach can achieve the same global savings of 43% while providing independent control of the virtual system. Further, we show that independent energy sharing through virtualization provides an additional 8% increase in savings to individual owners.

中文翻译：

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AutoShare：用于能源共享的虚拟社区太阳能和存储

住宅太阳能装置在房主中越来越受欢迎。但是，居住在共享建筑物中的租户和房主不能使用太阳能，因为他们不拥有共享空间。社区拥有的太阳能电池阵列和储能已成为一种解决方案，即使他们不拥有财产或屋顶，也能拥有所有权。然而，这种社区拥有的系统不允许个人控制他们的份额以优化家庭的电费。为了克服这一限制，受操作系统中虚拟化概念的启发，我们提出了虚拟社区拥有的太阳能和存储——一种允许个人独立控制其系统份额的逻辑抽象。我们认为这种个人控制可以使所有所有者受益并减少他们对电网电力的依赖。我们提出了为用户提供虚拟太阳能和电池抽象的机制和算法，并了解他们的成本效益。这样做时，我们与传统社区所有系统的比较表明，我们的 AutoShare 方法可以在提供对虚拟系统的独立控制的同时实现 43% 的相同全球节省。此外，我们还表明，通过虚拟化进行独立的能源共享为个人所有者带来了额外 8% 的节省。