Why are Self-Consumption and Internal Power Supply Interesting?

In light of the continuing trend towards lower feed-in tariffs and rising energy prices, the focus of system design has increasingly shifted away from maximizing PV generation towards intelligent energy management. There are two key objectives here:

• As much self-consumption of the generated PV energy as possible

• Full coverage of the energy requirement with PV energy (= self-sufficiency) if possible

Both of these are economically viable as soon as the PV generation costs fall below the costs of purchasing electricity.