Renewable energy in the home, is it possible?
Yes, it is possible, at home you can consume renewable electricity
And there are several ways, not necessarily equivalent or perfect, but that make the impact of consuming electrical energy, something inevitable, less. We will tell you three ways.
1- Have your own source of electricity.
You could install some renewable electricity source in your house. The most common are photovoltaic panels. This is known as self-consumption, and is used both in homes and in the field of companies.
Self-consumption has developed a lot in recent years due to the decrease in the costs of photovoltaic panels. Although it is usually reserved for homes that have a roof (country houses, detached villas or townhouses…), it is also possible to adhere to an “energy community” and practice shared self-consumption, which is possible for consumers who are located close to each other.
- Buy electricity certified as renewable
There are mechanisms such as ”Renewable Origin Guarantees”, which ensure that a specific amount of electrical energy consumed has been produced by a renewable generation plant during the same calendar year.
Its logic is not perfect, since electrical energy is hardly stored today, so we have no real guarantee that at any given time we are consuming electricity from a certain source. But its contribution is positive, since it helps to encourage new renewable generation projects to be built and to make existing ones profitable.
- It consumes electricity when it is really renewable.
This would be something complementary to the guarantees of origin, which as we have said are good but imperfect. At every moment, in your house you consume a mixture (or “mix”) of all the generation sources active at that moment. If you look at when renewables are the majority and plan your consumption at that time, your real consumption will be mostly renewable!
Imagine the following situation: you have to put on the washing machine, and you decide to wait for the time when the presence of renewable energy is greater. There are several tools that inform you in real time about the origin of electricity, one of which is The Planet App (if you have it installed on this terminal, click here to see the CO2 content of electricity in real time