Electricity Self-Sufficiency Improvement at a Holiday Park Resort under Local Grid Constraints

Holiday resorts represent a distinct and under-studied category of such consumers, combining high and persistent electricity demand with strong incentives for on-site decarbonisation.

This paper proposes a framework to analyse the 'techno-economic-emission' performance of a resort in South Wales, UK, integrating on-site low-carbon energy assets within the bounds of explicit DNO constraints. Optimal operation of the site electricity system was modelled as a deterministic mixed-integer linear programming formulation to minimise both electricity costs and emissions simultaneously under DNO-imposed import and export limits. A scenario-based assessment was applied to evaluate system performance across multiple technical, economic and emission metrics, comparing different system configurations.

Results indicate that on-site renewable generation capacity is the dominant driver of electricity self-sufficiency and emission reductions, while energy storage reduces curtailment under export-limited configurations. Compared to maximum self-sufficiency designs, balanced configurations deliver marginally lower self-sufficiency but substantially lower curtailment and grid exports. Results also show that DNO-imposed on-site installed generation capacity significantly restricts achievable self-sufficiency, preventing AC-coupled energy storage integration when maximising generation. In contrast, DC-coupled designs provide a practical workaround that preserves generation capacity headroom for storage integration, primarily reducing curtailment and exports.