Prefeasibility study of a distributed photovoltaic system with pumped hydro storage for residential buildings

•A study of photovoltaic-pumped hydro storage system for residential buildings is carried out.•Two grid-connected cases are examined to investigate techno-economic feasibility.•The payback periods are 9.01 years and 7.06 years respectively.•Self-consumption and self-sufficiency rate in apartment case are 59.69% and 76.47%.•A sensitivity analysis of key parameters on system performance is conducted. Distributed renewable energy systems are vital for satisfying the increasing demand for electricity in cities due to an influx of people. Nowadays, the residential buildings in metropolitan cities like Shanghai have natural height differences for potential energy, this advantage has not yet been fully exploited currently. To better utilize renewable energy, a grid-connected photovoltaic with pumped hydro storage system is first proposed for residential buildings, the operation principle of this system is then developed. Under Shanghai's time-of-use electricity price policy, the proposed methodology is applied in a case study to investigate the techno-economic feasibility of its application on villa and apartment residential buildings. Moreover, some technical indicators, such as self-consumption rate and self-sufficiency rate, are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology under different scenarios. The results demonstrate that the pumped hydro storage system on the apartment buildings can absorb more surplus power (4.83 kW h/d) from the photovoltaic system than on the villa buildings, meanwhile, it can also release more power (3.69 kW h/d) to meet the load demand. For residents of villa buildings and apartment buildings, the initial total investment is 35,417 and 36,423 Chinese yuan, respectively, while the payback periods are 9.01 and 7.06 years respectively. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is conducted for the apartment buildings, revealing that the photovoltaic capacity and load demand are the two key parameters affecting the cost and revenue of trading with the grid. A 25% increase in photovoltaic capacity can produce 123.3% higher net revenue value than the base case, and a 25% increase in load demand leads to a 102.7% decrease in net revenue. The variations in building height and upper reservoir volume have a marginal impact on net revenue compared with photovoltaic capacity and load demand.