Assessing the decarbonisation effect of household photovoltaic self-consumption

Abstract

The combination of falling renewable technology costs, with high and rising electricity prices and non-obstructive national regulations are making distributed generation increasingly attractive. In the case of photovoltaic (PV) systems, even domestic consumers find it profitable to self-produce part of their electricity demand, instead of purchasing all their energy from the grid, which is changing the current way of obtaining and consuming electricity. The purpose of this work is to estimate the decarbonisation effect in the Iberian/Spanish market, produced by domestic PV self-consumption, once the new regulation, passed in 2019, has removed the previous regulatory barriers in Spain. To achieve this goal, the nationwide, distributed, domestic PV self-production was turned into a reduction of the aggregate demand in the market, and the new clearing point and the corresponding dispatched generators list was established, by emulating the performance of the market operator. Based on 2016–2019 market data, the results suggest that self-consumption could decarbonise the Iberian electricity market, with an average rate of just over 300 tCO2-eq/year for each GWh/year of household PV self-consumed energy.