As global energy demand increases and environmental protection becomes a mainstream world issue, new energy markets The emergence of new energy markets is an important part of the solution to human needs. As European countries accelerate their energy restructuring, the domestic energy storage market is growing rapidly. Currently, Europe is the world’s largest market for domestic energy storage.
There are three main customer-side electricity options in Europe.
1. complete grid purchase: no rooftop PV or energy storage system is installed, and electricity demand is sourced entirely from the grid.
2. only PV systems are installed, no energy storage systems are installed: the proportion of self-generation and self-consumption is only 20-35%, with excess electricity sold back to the grid at midday when the PV is generating at high capacity, and some electricity bought back from the grid at night when the PV is not working.
3. Photovoltaic + energy storage”: the proportion of self-generation is increased to 60-90%, and the surplus electricity is sold back to the grid at midday.
As European residential electricity prices rise and the cost of photovoltaic storage falls, the economics of photovoltaic storage packages are becoming increasingly apparent. The cost of purchasing electricity in developed European countries such as Germany, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland is high and continues to rise. In Germany, for example, the cost of purchasing electricity for households has risen from 28.7 cents/kWh in 2015 to 30.5 cents/kWh in 2019 and is expected to continue to rise in the future. At the same time, the LCOE of PV and PV+ storage is decreasing, and the economics of PV packages and self-generation models are becoming more and more significant.
In addition, the PV+ storage model brings more flexibility and facilitates the emergence of innovative business cases in the photovoltaic storage sector. The combination of different devices and virtual power plants (VPP) is bringing more value creation to the domestic energy storage market.
Policy subsidies played an important driving role in the early stages of the industry’s development, but as PV technology continues to mature and market orientation becomes clearer, European countries have weakened PV subsidies and gradually shifted to the energy storage market, driving the rapid development of the energy storage market. In the future, with the further increase of PV penetration and PV distribution and storage penetration, the European energy storage market has a bright future. According to SolorPower Europe’s forecast, by 2023, the European According to SolorPower Europe’s forecast, the new installed capacity of the European domestic energy storage market will exceed 1GWh by 2023.
