Assessing the viability of battery energy storage systems coupled with photovoltaics under a pure self-consumption scheme

Over the last few decades, there is a constantly increasing deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems both at the commercial and residential building sector. However, the steadily growing PV penetration poses several technical problems to electric power systems, mainly related to power quality issues. To this context, the exploitation of energy storage systems integrated along with PVs could constitute a possible solution. The scope of this paper is to thoroughly evaluate the economic viability of hybrid PV-and-Storage systems at the residential building level under a future pure self-consumption policy that provides no reimbursement for excess PV energy injected to the grid. For this purpose, an indicator referred to as the Levelized Cost of Use is utilized for the assessment of the competitiveness of hybrid PV-and-Storage systems in the energy market, considering various sizes of the hybrid system, battery energy storage costs and prosumer types for six Mediterranean countries. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.