Residential PV Self-Consumption and the Value of Community Aggregation: A Low-Membership Case Study Under the Application of Alternative Pricing Regimes

According to recent official data, the EU solar market showed—for the first time in a decade—signs of saturation, with near-future predictions suggesting a mild downturn in new PV installations, driven also by stagnating effects encountered in the residential and business sectors. On the other hand, the emergence of collective power generation schemes introduces a new means of pooling resources, which, through the aggregation of individual actors, may support more efficient system design and enable investment in the field. Toward this direction, and through empirical modeling, the impact of local PV power generation on the energy and economic performance of similar installations in the residential sector is currently examined, under the application of a typical PV self-consumption scheme and constrained exports of PV excess. For that purpose, an open, smart-metering dataset of electricity data for a limited pool of households is exploited, and an extensive mapping exercise associating energy and economic performance outputs with market conditions and sizing assumptions is conducted, under the application of two distinct electricity pricing regimes, i.e., dynamic pricing and fixed tariffs. Next, emphasis is given to assessing the value of end-user aggregation in the context of the given ecosystem, acknowledging the small number of households examined in the study and deliberately excluding the effect of economies of scale. To that end, the results obtained reflect on the important role of aggregation, comprising, even in the case of low-membership, household-based energy communities, a risk-hedging instrument against both evolving market conditions and alternative pricing regimes examined.