A Comparative Examination of the Electricity Saving Potentials of Direct Residential PV Energy Use in European Countries

Abstract

The increasing global penetration of photovoltaic (PV) technology creates not only enormous opportunities for clean energy production but also poses challenges that put energy systems to the test. Although there are many ways of dealing with the rising share of PV energy, most of these solutions require substantial funding, time, and effort to implement, which highlights the importance of solving some of the issues at their source, i.e., through the direct use of the electricity generated at PV power plants, many of which are owned and operated by households. In recent decades, PV technology has experienced an unprecedented growth in Europe due to a range of reasons, including the nations’ policies and supporting schemes. The goal of the present research was to determine the annual consumption of electricity per capita in the households of certain European countries and how much of this can be covered by the direct use of PV energy in the case of an on-grid PV system and to show what the annual potential of the direct use of PV energy is compared to the annual energy production of the PV systems. The significance and novelty of this research is justified by the lack of comparative scientific studies related to the annual potential of the direct household use of PV energy, which could alleviate some of the problems facing electricity networks with high shares of PV energy. The novel practical benefit of the study was determining, for the examined European countries, the extent to which direct household PV energy use could lower annual electricity consumption from the grid, in the case of on-grid PV systems of different capacities. In addition, these findings also provide information related to the grid’s macro-energy systems in terms of local network load effects related to given investment sizes.