Self-consumption

A consultation about raising the level of payments made for excess household electricity injected into the grid appears to have prompted fears it could raise solar power prices across the board.

One of the first items in the in-tray of the country’s new Socialist Party government must be to unblock Portugal’s seemingly huge appetite for PPA-backed merchant solar sites and to deliver the PV projects which were tendered by the authorities, to global acclaim, in 2019 and 2020.

One of the schemes is linked to household and commercial electricity customers who want to install a PV array to charge electric vehicles.

A report by the IEA laying out two routes for China to reach net zero attempts to persuade policymakers to gun for that goal by 2050, rather than ten years later, and dangles the prospect of continued global dominance as the main reward on offer.

The European Commission has determined France can offer the owners of building-mounted panels with a generation capacity of up to 500 kW a 20-year feed-in tariff without breaching the bloc’s state aid rules.

Paris intends to secure 34 GW of solar, onshore wind and hydroelectric generation capacity by 2026 by offering generators premium payments – determined by competitive reverse-bidding among developers – to top-up the market electricity price.

State body the NEA has given its provincial offices until July 15th to suggest counties where a solar mandate – which rises to at least half of all government roofspace – can be rolled out. Selected companies will be awarded whole-county contracts.

Although self-consumption of solar power is the optimal economic approach, the expense of household batteries at present outweighs the increased ability they offer to use electricity generated on the roof. Whether aggregated ‘virtual batteries’ offer better returns is an open question, due to lack of electricity company transparency.

The government’s clean power department has signed a co-operation agreement with a major clothing industry trade body in a bid to drive net-metered solar rooftop installation.

pv magazine’s updated market overview now lists details for 54 suppliers offering 198 systems, components, or services in the field of large-scale and commercial power storage. Many of the market players highlighted a range of particularly sought-after business models in the information they provided. The most frequently cited in the survey was a business model that increases the share of self-consumption in combination with solar PV plants and peak-load capping.