Economic, environmental and social analysis of decentralized power production and storage in Belgium

The power generation sector is in an ongoing transition. With the invention of photovoltaic power production and the important decrease of its capital cost in the last few years, little solar power plants are growing everywhere. Households, commercial and industrial buildings have all entered the quest to decentralization of power production. Belgium is on the front line of this transition as the 4th country worldwide with the highest solar power capacity per inhabitant. But excessive subsidisation of solar power and negative impacts of intermittent power output has created important financial losses to electric utilities, pushing the Belgian government to harden the environment for prosumers. The objective of this report is to offer a rational input on the debate surrounding decentralized power production and storage (DPPS). By developing a linear optimization program a big-scale deployement of DPPS in Belgium is economically, environmentally and socio-economically assessed. Eight different types of buildings and two different storage technologies are compared. It is concluded that decentralized solar power is a good path to follow for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the next twenty years if the policymakers take the financial gap created by prosumers into account. Day-to-day and seasonal storage are effective in reducing and even removing solar power curtailment and by such reducing net greenhouse gas emissions. But, as of today, the storage systems' capital costs are still too high for building owners and electric utilities to gain any economic profit from it, even when taking into account the forecast decrease in costs for the next twenty years.