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

Franz Harke () and Philipp Otto
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Franz Harke: Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics, Leibniz University Hannover, 30167 Hannover, Germany
Philipp Otto: Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics, Leibniz University Hannover, 30167 Hannover, Germany

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 3, 1-20

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.

Keywords: self-sufficiency; time-series model; multi-parameter optimization; SDG7; SDG13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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