Economic Value of Building-Integrated PV Production at High-Latitude Locations

This work evaluates the status and prospects of building-integrated solar photovoltaic (BIPV) production in Finland, focusing on maintaining the value of the produced PV electricity during the lifetime of the system. The rapid increase of PV capacity in Finland causes major effects to the power system and the electricity market price, especially by lowering the price during the best PV production hours. This phenomenon can demotivate individual citizens and companies to invest in their own PV systems. To tackle the challenges related to the future uncertainties in the electricity price, maximizing the self-consumption of the planned BIPV system is important. Self-consuming the produced PV electricity allows avoiding transfer fee and taxes, which form, on average, most of the electricity purchase costs for the Finnish individuals. This work presents the recent research in the fields of BIPV and electricity price at high-latitude locations. Based on the existing scientific knowledge, we develop solutions for residential and commercial buildingowners for designing PV systems that are resilient and profitable. The economic feasibility of these solutions with the 2019-2023 electricity price data is analyzed. The results show that high self-consumption rates result in high economic value: net present values were 665–883 EUR/kW for the studied systems during the years 2019-2023, covering more than half of reasonable investment costs.