Analysis of photovoltaic businessmodels competitivenessCase study in Poitiers, France

Abstract: Today in France, almost all the electricity production of small and large PV installations is directly sold to the grid. However, thanks to the constant drop of photovoltaic module costs and the rise of electricity purchase price, a new business model gains in profitability and seems to become an attractive option to the classic feed-in to the grid: namely maximum self-consumption at the point of electricity production. The objective of this thesis work is to study the economic competitiveness of self-consumption as opposed to other common economic models (such as feeding to the grid only, or self-consumption with overproduction feed-in) in the locality of Poitiers, France, from small-scale electricity consumers (houses and small offices) to larger ones (large office buildings and supermarkets). A detailed model is developed in order to assess the profitability of a given PV installation evaluated with two economic factors: internal return rate and net present value. Through a techno-economic analysis, the evolution of these variables for each building and each economic model as a function of the PV system size is analysed. It appears that the main economic model which involves selling all the produced electricity to the grid is not always the most profitable one. Indeed, self-consumption is already economically attractive and even the most profitable scheme for really large consumers with large PV installations due to high achievable self-consumption share. However, due to attractive feed-in-tariff, injection business model is still the most profitable one for PV installations below 36 kWp, no matter the building load profile. Besides, for PV installation with a production larger than the building consumption, selling all the production to the grid is always the most profitable business model. On the other hand, the self-consumption with feed-in-tariff business model is almost always the least profitable one. Finally, the techno-economic analysis of rooftop PV systems is complemented with a discussion on the developed model limitation due to the assumed hypotheses and numerous variable factors influencing the project profitability. The future seems promising for the self-consumption model.