The role and benefits of residential rooftop photovoltaic prosumers in Brazil

Abstract

With the declining costs of photovoltaics (PV), a recent and widespread uptake of residential rooftop PV is underway in Brazil and many other sunbelt countries. Electricity consumers produce some or all their energy and become prosumers = producers + consumers. We present a method to evaluate the role and benefits of residential rooftop PV to prosumers and show a case-study using one of the 1250 PV-powered households in the “Celesc PV Bonus Project”, promoted by the local distribution utility Celesc to demonstrate our method in Florianópolis-Brazil. The methodology was divided into five principal stages: (i) Solar resource at the site; (ii) PV system performance indicators; (iii) Consumption profiles; (iv) CO2 emissions avoided and; (v) Comparative analysis between the individual PV rooftop case study with the average of PV households in the Florianópolis region. From the utility's perspective, the annual electricity consumption was reduced by 18% after PV integration. From the prosumer's perspective, the total annual consumption increased by 8%. However, the annual reduction in electrical utility expenses was 54%. The adoption of rooftop PV in residential households in Brazil was demonstrated to be advantageous, and payback times are still on a downward trend due to the continuing price reductions experienced by the PV technology.