Solar Self-Sufficient Households as a Driving Factor for Sustainability Transformation

authored by

Franz Harke, Philipp Otto

Abstract

We present a model to estimate the technical requirements, including the photovoltaic area and battery capacity, along with the costs, for a four-person household to be 100% electrically self-sufficient in Germany. We model the hourly electricity consumption of private households with quasi-Fourier series and an autoregressive statistical model based on data from Berlin in 2010. Combining the consumption model and remote-sensed hourly solar irradiance data from the ERA5 data set, we find the optimal photovoltaic area and battery capacity that would have been necessary to be self-sufficient in electricity from July 2002 to June 2022. We show that it is possible to build a self-sufficient household with today’s storage technology for private households and estimate the costs expected to do so.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics

Type

Article

Journal

Sustainability (Switzerland)

Volume

15

ISSN

2071-1050

Publication date

02.02.2023

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science (miscellaneous), Geography, Planning and Development, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Building and Construction, Environmental Science (miscellaneous), Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Hardware and Architecture, Computer Networks and Communications, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032734 (Access: Open)