Exploring the Grid Electricity Saving Potentials of Using Hybrid PV Systems in European Countries: A Comparative Study

All over the world nations make efforts, albeit to differing degrees, to mitigate climate change by substantially changing the composition of their energy mixes by relying more on renewable sources of energy instead of fossil fuels. As part of this process, many of them provide households with various financial incentives to deploy technologies based on the use of renewable sources of energy, especially photovoltaic (PV) systems. As a consequence of these measures and the high solar irradiation rates of many European nations, PV energy has enjoyed a great boom in Europe in the last couple of decades, also prompted by the need to reduce households’ electricity costs, ever-rising due to increasing prices and the growing consumption of electric power. For international investors building residential solar systems, it is important to be aware of the different risks and energy use factors associated with investing in various countries, as well as their regulatory environments, which need to be considered. The aim of the present study was to determine the proportions of the potential savings in household electricity consumption from the grid in different European countries by directly using PV energy in the case of PV systems with PV capacities between 0.5 kW and 5 kW equipped with lithium-ion energy storage devices with usable energy capacities between 0 kWh and 20 kWh. Furthermore, the potentials of direct PV energy use in relation to the annual energy production of the hybrid PV systems with the indicated technical parameters were also determined. The novelty and innovative significance of the research is that no previous research has ever carried out a comparative study to determine the annual grid electricity savings that can be achieved by the direct use of PV energy with a hybrid PV system equipped with battery energy storage, in the context of European households.