The first large-scale PV project to address household integration in urban areas is Amsterdam's Nieuw Sloten project. The 250 kWp PV system, which is owned by the energy company ENW, utilizes the roofs of 71 privately owned homes in a new housing area of Amsterdam.

One of the challenges of integrating PV into high-density urban areas is to balance some architectural freedom with technical constraints such as positioning and orientation. Data monitoring of the Nieuw Sloten project will help in evaluating the impact of differences in module orientation on system performance.

Nieuw Sloten has already offered some valuable lessons for future large-scale PV integration developments: it has allowed the comparison of scenarios in which the utility effectively uses the roof area and large inverters as a central generation plant to other scenarios in which house owners lease the PV system and have a two-way meter to offset imports from the main grid with PV energy exports.

Nieuw Sloten has also confirmed that it is essential in large-scale developments for the property developer and architect to specify PV from the project outset to avoid potentially costly additions at a later stage of the development.

From the market point of view, buyers respond very positively to the concept of PV-houses. The next step in the Dutch urban PV integration programme - a 1 MWp grid-connected system for the city of Amersfoort - will serve to strengthen this view by adopting the Guarantee of Solar Results (GSR) principle. Under the GSR arrangement, the quality and expected system performance are guaranteed to strengthen consumer confidence in PV.

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