Domestic
electricity consumers with PV panels have become known as “prosumers”; some of them
also have energy storage and we have named the combination “prosumage”. T
he challenges of
renewable intermittency
could be offset by storing power, and m
any engineering st
udies consider
the role and value of storage which is properly integrated into the ‘smart grid’. Such a system with
holistic optimal control may fail to materialise for regulatory, economic, or behavioural reasons.
We
therefore model the impact of naïve prosumage: households which use storage only to maximise
self-
consumption of PV, with no consideration of the wider system. We find it is neither
economic
for arbitrage nor particularly beneficial for shaving peaks and filling troughs in national net demand.
The extreme case of renewable self
-sufficiency, becoming completely independent of the grid, is still
prohibitively
expensive in Britain and Germany, and even
in
a country like Spain
with a much better
solar resource
.