PV GRID advisory paper: consultation version: key recommendations

B. Barth, G. Concas, R. Cossent, O. Franz, P. Frías, R. Hermes, R. Lama, H. Loew, C. Mateo, M. Rekinger, P.M. Sonvilla, M. Vandenbergh, E. Binda Zane, D. Busek, E. Collado, D. Craciun, M. Di Napoli, V. Helmbrecht, Z. Musilova, J. Reneses

Summary:
PV GRID is a transnational collaborative effort under the umbrella of the Intelligent Energy Europe programme. The main project goal is to enhance photovoltaic (PV) hosting capacity in distribution grids while overcoming regulatory and normative barriers hampering the application of available technical solutions. Solutions have been identified and explored by the PV GRID project consortium, including fifteen national and European PV associations, two distribution system operators (DSOs), a policy and a technical consultancy, a regulatory research institute and other electricity sector experts. Starting with the most effective solutions, and by discussing the barriers to their application, the project consortium has developed regulatory and normative recommendations aimed at reducing and removing the current barriers. The normative recommendations address administrative barriers and other obstacles that either DSOs or PV operators have to face when implementing technical solutions that would instead allow for higher grid hosting capacity, such as inappropriate grid codes and insufficient technical standards. Regulatory recommendations, on the other hand, address the framework in which DSOs and PV system owners operate economically. For instance, a certain national regulatory framework may not allow a DSO to recover the costs of necessary grid-enhancing investments. Also, a PV system operator may not be correctly incentivised (by means of network tariffs, for instance) to make efficient use of the distribution grid. The European PV GRID advisory paper aims at providing an overview of the issues and barriers that need to be addressed in order to enhance the distribution grid hosting capacity for PV and other distributed generation (DG). To this purpose, barriers are classified as either cross-cutting challenges or specific barriers, depending on whether they have an overarching, system-wide character or rather focus on one single issue such as curtailment, self-consumption or storage. Finally, a set of preliminary recommendations on how to overcome these issues is presented, allowing for the implementation of the identified technical solutions. […]

IIT Project: PV GRID_IEE (PV GRID)

Funding entity: Comisión Europea. Intelligent Energy-Europe (IEE)

Publication date: 01-12-2013

IIT-13-190I