Revolutionizing Energy: How Solar Sharing is Thriving in Apartment Buildings and Transforming Electricity Consumption

Sharing makes it possible, for example, to send electricity from photovoltaics on the roof of a small house to an apartment in the city, or to send current from the roof of a school to a sports hall within the city.

According to experts, when they share, it is necessary that overflows into the grid occur as little as possible, because the sale of electricity is not so financially beneficial.

“If you use all the energy during consumption and store what’s left in your own battery, you won’t have to pay distribution and other costs. When choosing, it is advisable to increase the storage so that there is as little flow into the network as possible,” said Pavel Bursa, co-owner of Resacs.

Nominal batteries can store energy for worse times – for example, on cold nights or times when there is less sunlight. A variable is also the use of “virtual battery”, ie the ability to send excess electricity to the network, but not be paid for it by the supplier, but to keep it. You don’t pay for such electricity when you consume it, but you have to pay a distribution fee because you send it to the grid once and then you take it back from the grid.

Therefore, a regulated part of the price is paid for electricity consumption, which at the most common distribution rate is around CZK 3.30 per kilowatt hour. If you want to sell electricity from photovoltaics, the purchase price per kilowatt hour is between two crowns.

More than 5120 production centers and 5508 collection points are currently registered for sharing.

“In the first three months, we have recorded almost 12,000 registrations. So far, more than ten thousand participants have gone through the whole process up to the signing of the contract. They have joined more than four thousand organizations, which include active customers, apartment buildings and energy communities,” said the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Energy Data Center, Petr Kusý.

He indicated that with progressively lower solar intensity, he expects relatively smaller amounts of shared electricity in the coming months, and expects a significant increase again in the spring. Among the sharing groups, the active customer mode prevails, when, for example, a group of up to eleven people can share electricity together. All they have to do is register at the data center and replace the electricity meters with a new, smart one. Distributors do this for free after registering with the center. Almost more than four thousand people have participated in such sharing so far. The greatest interest is in sharing within one or more buildings. This applies to almost all other contracts that come to an end.

“In October, we also registered the first energy community. These usually allow electricity to be shared between a larger number of members, but their registration process is more demanding and requires registration with the Energy Regulatory Office. So we expect a bigger increase in the number of these communities around the middle of next year,” said Kusý.