Self-sufficient in a single-family house
Two million European single-family homes could abandon the grid by 2050
Picture: Markus Breig (KIT)
Researchers from the Energy System Design program at Helmholtz Energy investigated the potential for a completely self-sufficient energy supply for European single-family homes. The motivation for this project was the rising electricity prices in Europe and the question of whether it would be possible to cover a large part of one's own electricity and heat consumption by investing in local energy supply systems.
For the study, 4000 representative houses were analyzed on the basis of high-resolution geographical building data and under local climatic and economic conditions in order to develop cost-optimized, energy self-sufficient energy systems. Neural networks transferred the results to 41 million houses. The researchers showed that 53% of European single-family homes would already be technically capable of being self-sufficient using photovoltaics and battery storage. With 50% more investment compared to grid supply, over two million homes could be off-grid by 2050. The optimal self-sufficient system in Central Europe consists of photovoltaics, short-term battery storage and long-term hydrogen storage. The methodological challenges of this study lay in the scaling of experiments to 41 million homes. The results of this study were published in the renowned journal Joule.
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