Households with photovoltaic installations contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating global climate change. To fully utilize the benefits of clean solar energy, it is essential to ensure its efficient use, which can be achieved by consuming all generated energy locally, within the household or a microgrid community, eliminating wastage during the grid transportation and storage. In this work, we propose a method to enhance self-consumption by eliminating simultaneous bidirectional energy flow in the phase lines of a three-phase grid-tied household system, particularly in cases of significant load asymmetry. We developed an adaptive power flow management (APFM) algorithm which distributes solar-generated energy across the household grid’s phase lines based on their respective loads and solar power generation level. A simulation based on real-world data demonstrated that the APFM algorithm both eliminates simultaneous active power import and export flows and ensures that all power exported from the household to the DSO grid remains symmetrical across all phase lines. As observed from the simulation results, applying the APFM algorithm reduced the daily imported and exported energy between the household and the DSO grid by an average of 27.5% during the spring–autumn period for a specific household. Additionally, reducing energy flow led to a 5% average increase in self-consumption within the household grid, with peak improvements reaching 16.5%.

In this study, we investigate the impact of electric energy storage (EES) on phase line power flow symmetry and photovoltaic (PV) energy utilization in prosumer three-phase four-wire integrated household systems. The analysis is based on high-time-resolution (1 s) experimental data collected from a real household grid and subsequent simulations of energy flows using MATLAB/Simulink software. Two converter operation strategies were evaluated: the conventional symmetric mode and the asymmetric mode developed by the authors based on an adaptive power flow management algorithm. For both strategies, the impact of EES capacity on imbalance in the distribution system operator (DSO) grid was investigated. The methodology analyzes energy flows in each phase line separately, allowing for a detailed assessment of the imbalance between phase line phenomena and their impact on local energy consumption. Key performance parameters used for the efficiency evaluation include the self-consumption and self-sufficiency rates, which quantify the share of locally generated energy consumed within the household and the degree of independence from the DSO grid. The results show that combining adaptive asymmetric inverter control with appropriately sized energy storage allows for more efficient on-site utilization of PV energy, which, at the same time, improves the load symmetry of the phase lines in the DSO grid.