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Abstract

Decarbonizing the building sector is key to meet the EU climate goals by 2050. Although the recent policies recognized the importance of on-site solar energy production in the energy transition, there are only a few modelling studies analyzing how much the gap between the technically possible and policy-driven power generation of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels can be reduced. This study, therefore, uses geospatial techniques and the high-resolution Building Integrated Solar Energy (BISE) supply model to estimate the main spatial and temporal characteristics of the rooftop PV energy production potential. To support decision-making, important implications of the Solar Rooftop Initiative action plan of the European Commission on the future dimension of the PV electricity supply are also assessed in the context of the achievable potential. The modelling results indicate that the current rooftop PV technical potential could be about 2.7 PWh, being in similar extent with the EU power consumption. The largest country-level PV potentials can be found in Germany, France, Italy and Poland, with an increase of 30% by 2060. Our findings also underline that by following the latest policies, major improvement could be achieved in the EU's rooftop solar energy production by around 2040, depending greatly on the structure and energy efficiency niveau of the future building stock.

Publication Date

2024-04-15

Publication Title

Applied Energy

Volume

360

ISSN

0306-2619

Acceptance Date

2024-01-21

Deposit Date

2024-07-02

Funding

This paper is based on research conducted within the EC funded Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (EU H2020) Project titled “Sustainable Energy Transitions Laboratory” (SENTINEL)- Grant Agreement No. 837089. Dr. Ürge-Vorsatz, Dr. Chatterjee, and Dr. Molnár would like to acknowledge the support from the EC. The content of the paper is the sole responsibility of its authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the EC. Dr. Ürge-Vorsatz and Dr. Chatterjee have also received funding from the Energy Demand changes Induced by Technological and Social innovations (EDITS) project, which is part of the initiative coordinated by the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (and funded by Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), Japan). This work is partially supported by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme. Dr. Cabeza would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to her research group (2017 SGR 1537). GREiA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia.

Keywords

Building Integrated Solar Energy (BISE) model, Building roof area, Energy transition, Rooftop PV potential, Solar energy modelling

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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