Self-consumption

Nowadays, individuals and businesses have the ability to generate electricity for their own use. This concept is known as self-consumption.

A Tool that Empowers Consumers

Self-consumption enables consumers to produce and use their own electricity. It plays an increasingly significant role in the energy transition as it empowers consumers, promotes electrification, and aids in reducing emissions.

According to the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan, there is a goal of achieving 19 GW of solar self-consumption by 2030.

Reduction of CO2 Emissions

Renewable generators, particularly photovoltaics, play a crucial role in supporting self-consumption, enabling us to make significant progress in reducing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere.

Minimise Energy Dependency

By minimising our reliance on fossil fuels, energy self-consumption becomes an essential component in achieving energy autonomy. Therefore, it is a key component that contributes to the promotion of energy autonomy.

Varieties of Self-consumption

Self-consumption involves the setup of photovoltaic solar panels or other renewable energy sources in residences, businesses, or communities. How many categories of self-consumption exist?

Self-consumption can be classified as either individual or collective, depending on whether multiple connected consumers are supplied with the generated energy.

Self-consumption with surpluses, if the facilities allow the generated energy that is not going to be self-consumed or self-consumption without surpluses to be dumped into the grid, it has a device that prevents this discharge.

Within the self-consumption with surpluses category, there can be two cases: one that is covered by an economic compensation mechanism and one that sells the surplus directly on the market.

Self-consumption and Grids

Self-consumption is a key factor in the transformation of energy. Nevertheless, it is not a substitute for the development of electrical grids, which are crucial in ensuring a secure and reliable energy supply of high quality to households, industries and services. Self-consumption is one of the key elements in the development of renewable energies and for the purposes of achieving the objectives of the European energy agenda.

The PNIEC proposes a target of 48% renewable penetration in the final use of energy by 2030, reaching 81% renewable in the electricity sector. Among the Plan's objectives is the strengthening of the role of citizens in the energy transition, in line with the need to guarantee consumers the right to produce, consume, store and sell their own renewable energy. In this sense, self-consumption stands out as a tool to address several of the objectives established in the PNIEC and has as an element of development with the Self-consumption Roadmap that establishes the objectives of self-consumption for the period 2021-2030 and identifies the existing challenges and proposals to overcome them and achieve these objectives.

The importance of observability

The energy transition is advancing in Spain thanks to the development of the transmission grid and the roll-out of renewables. Other complementary factors also stand out, such as self-consumption, which empowers consumers and promotes electrification. For the system operator, it is essential to have maximum observability of this entire transformation and of what is happening in the electricity system at all times.

This is more difficult in the case of self-consumption, with thousands of small-scale installations. For this reason, the system operator has been working for years to improve its measurement and estimation tools and forecasting models to incorporate self-consumption information that allows its behaviour to be anticipated.

Self Consumption Platform

Among other actions, we have developed a platform to increase real-time observability of this vector and facilitate its safe integration into the electric system. This platform uses information currently available from measurement devices integrated into the inverters from the manufacturers (Ingeteam so far). The goal of the platform is to define a representative sample of self-consumers (panel) by increasing the number of participating manufacturers.

The Self-Consumption Platform is a collaborative project aimed at facilitating the energy transition. If you are a manufacturer or manager of a self-consumption data platform and you are interested in participating, you can obtain more information through PlataformaAutoconsumo@ree.es