**2. The different types of installations**

The first difficulty for French people who want to invest in photovoltaic panels is to choose the type of their future installation. There are currently two main families.

The first is the total resale also called total injection (**Figure 1**) [4]. All the energy produced is resold to a supplier and is redistributed on the national grid. The supply of the house is classically done by the network. Here the individual will still be subject to

**Figure 1.** *Total resale.*

*What is the Profitability of a Photovoltaic Installation in France for an Individual? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109859*

the inflation of electricity. This type of installation is finally a simple financial investment in renewable energy.

The second possibility is self-consumption, which has been widely developed in 2015 (**Figure 2**) [5]. The energy produced is primarily consumed directly by the individual. Some variants exist for the management of the surplus energy. It can either be injected into the grid and bought back by the supplier or not sold and then lost or stored in batteries or virtually. The self-consumption allows direct reduction of the electricity bill of a private individual.

In the continuation of this article, the profitability of installation in total resale and in self-consumption with surplus will be compared.
