Measuring solar curtailment before sizing a battery

01 · The problem

Commercial and industrial PV owners in Cyprus are losing production to curtailment. The inverter app shows what the system produced, not what it lost when it was curtailed, so most owners do not know the real cost.

Without a measured loss, a behind-the-meter battery cannot be sized or priced with any confidence.

02 · What was done

1. At Renewable Labs we went through the DSO’s (ΔΣΔ) daily curtailment reports for October 2025 to August 2026, a period of 335 days.
2. We counted the days with curtailment for two size classes of system: 120 to 400 kW systems controlled via SCADA, and systems above 400 kW.
3. We looked at the hours in which the curtailments fall, because that sets when a battery would charge.

03 · What it showed

Curtailment is the norm for commercial systems, not the exception. It falls in the best solar hours of the day.

Published figures point the same way: residential PV systems were curtailed up to 17 times within one month, and large PV parks had curtailments of up to 66% of their energy in April.

Storage is arriving slowly. Reports state that the DSO issued connection terms for only 16 applications for storage at existing PV parks, 29 MW in total, before it stopped issuing terms.

04 · What it means

Measure the curtailment loss on your own system first.

Then look at behind-the-meter storage and at shifting consumption into the midday hours. A battery that charges from your own curtailed solar at noon and discharges into the evening peak works directly against the curtailment pattern above.