Quantifying self-consumption linked to solar home battery systems: Statistical analysis and economic assessment

By Sylvain Quoilin, K. Kavvadias, A. Mercier, Irene Pappone, A. Zucker. 2016

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent development of new and innovative home battery systems has been seen by many as a catalyst for a solar energy revolution, and has created high expectations in the sector. Many observers have predicted an uptake of combined PV/battery units which could ultimately disconnect from the grid and lead to autonomous homes or micro-grids. However, most of the comments in social media, blogs or press articles lack proper cost evaluation and realistic simulations. We aim to bridge this gap by simulating self-consumption in various EU countries, for various household profiles, with or without battery. Results indicate that (1) self-consumption is a non-linear, almost asymptotic function of PV and battery sizes. Achieving 100% self-consumption (i.e. allowing for full off-grid operation) is not realistic for the studied countries without excessively oversizing the PV system and/or the battery; (2) although falling fast, the cost of domestic Li-Ion storage is most likely still too high for a large-scale market uptake in Europe; (3) home battery profitability and future uptake depend mainly on the indirect subsidies for self-consumption provided by the structure of retail prices; (4) the self-sufficiency rate varies widely between households. For a given household, the volume of self-consumption cannot be predicted in a deterministic way. Along with these results, this study also provides a database of synthetic household profiles, a simulation tool for the prediction of self-consumption and a method for the optimal sizing of such systems.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa1f3244ca99de06c902b089d66957c2775407cf

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Prosumage of solar electricity: pros, cons, and the system perspective (2017, background): “Quoilin et al. (2016) simulate PV self-consumption for different households in various EU countries and find that self-consumption rates without batteries vary between 30% and 37%.”
Techno-economic analysis of the viability of residential photovoltaic systems using lithium-ion batteries for energy storage in the United Kingdom (2017, background): “In many markets, small-scale generation from solar PV has increased rapidly, driven by cost reductions and subsidies [14,16].”
Economic assessment of photovoltaic battery systems based on household load profiles (2018, background): “[24] emphasize the importance of using realistic load profiles, as aggregated data does not sufficiently reflect the dynamics in the load of individual households, which makes them ill-suited for the assessment of self-sufficiency and self-consumption.”