PV Prosumption: Potential & Business Models to Boost the PV Sector in Europe
In June, several of the EU HEROES team attended a seminar on PV Prosumption, run by our colleagues from the PVP4Grid project.
PVP4 Grid is a separate project, with a focus on prosumer models also, funded under the same call of the EU Horizon 2020 programme as EU HEROES. A third project, iDistributedPV, was also funded under the same round and all three projects are co-ordinating our activity and sharing information.
The PVP4 Grid event in June was run alongside Intersolar, the international clean energy trade fair and conference and attracted an audience of academics, private sector specialists, policymakers and energy agencies. The event looked at how prosumer businesses are developing across Europe.
For anyone not familiar with the terminology, “prosumer” is a phrase that has been coined to describe people who generate and use their own energy. Especially relevant for roof-mounted PV, this approach poses challenges to the traditional way of generating and using energy but could help to balance supply and demand through people storing and using the energy they generate within their own homes and workplaces.
The seminar reviewed how prosumer models can work for different sectors including domestic, commercial and community sectors. The presentations from the workshop are available here: https://www.pvp4grid.eu/presentations/
One interesting observation from the Intersolar trade fair was that a huge number of companies are now offering integrated PV and Battery systems (sometimes also integrating home EV charging and/or thermal storage), both for homes and community/business scale applications. Watch this space for continued cost reductions and product improvements in this vital area!
