Distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are projected to be a key contributor to future energy landscape, but are often poorly represented in energy models due to their distributed nature. They have higher costs. ••Detailed modeling of distributed PV in sector-coupled European. PV systems are expected to become a leading energy producer in many regions as they have very competitive costs that are expected to decrease even further due to technology lea. We model a future European energy system with global CO2 emissions limited to 5% of 1990 level, using 2-h time resolution for a full year, and 181 nodes to represent the diff. 3.1. Trends in system costs and capacityTotal system costs for the three scenarios, with and without distributed generation, are shown in Fig. 3. For all scenarios, distributed gener. In this study, we model a highly renewable European energy system represented by 181 interconnected nodes in order to analyze how distributed solar PV affects the operation and tot.