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Nine Innovative Approaches That Utilities are Using to Plan for Increased Rooftop Solar
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/09/20/nine-innovative-approaches-utilities-using-plan-increased-rooftop-solar/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Nine Innovative Approaches That Utilities are Using to Plan for Increased Rooftop Solar[/font]
[font size=4] Berkeley Lab-led report offers a comparative analysis of roughly 30 recent utility integrated resource plans or other generation planning studies, transmission planning studies, and distribution system plans[/font]
News Release Jon Weiner 510-486-4014 • September 20, 2016
[font size=3]When an individual utility customer decides to add rooftop solar to their home or business, the utility needs to deliver less power to that customer from other sources. A small number of solar adopters may not have much of an impact, but rapid growth in rooftop solar in some parts of the country has the potential to significantly impact the need for generating resources and transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure.
To account for these changing needs, utilities are increasingly incorporating rooftop solar into their planning practices.
A new report by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory surveys utility planning practices from roughly 30 studies across the United States. The rapid growth of rooftop solar has not been distributed equally across U.S. utility territories, and the same is true for projected future growth. While some of the studies forecast rooftop solar to be equivalent to 5% or more of retail sales by 2020, fewer than half consider penetrations beyond 1% by 2020. As a result, utilities and other planning organizations have differed in their perceptions about the need to incorporate rooftop solar into resource and T&D plans. Because of this staggered progress, organizations that are just beginning to address rooftop solar can draw on innovative practices from organizations that already are incorporating rooftop solar rigorously into their plans. In this report, “Planning for a Distributed Disruption: Innovative Practices for Incorporating Distributed Solar into Utility Planning,” the researchers highlight these innovative planning approaches across nine methodological areas.
One of the challenges utilities face with incorporating solar into planning studies is that customer decisions are central to where and when rooftop solar is adopted in most cases. An innovative approach to incorporating these decisions into utility planning is to use a customer adoption model that accounts for the available rooftop space, the customer economics of rooftop solar, and the diffusion of new technologies into the market.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4] Berkeley Lab-led report offers a comparative analysis of roughly 30 recent utility integrated resource plans or other generation planning studies, transmission planning studies, and distribution system plans[/font]
News Release Jon Weiner 510-486-4014 • September 20, 2016
[font size=3]When an individual utility customer decides to add rooftop solar to their home or business, the utility needs to deliver less power to that customer from other sources. A small number of solar adopters may not have much of an impact, but rapid growth in rooftop solar in some parts of the country has the potential to significantly impact the need for generating resources and transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure.
To account for these changing needs, utilities are increasingly incorporating rooftop solar into their planning practices.
A new report by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory surveys utility planning practices from roughly 30 studies across the United States. The rapid growth of rooftop solar has not been distributed equally across U.S. utility territories, and the same is true for projected future growth. While some of the studies forecast rooftop solar to be equivalent to 5% or more of retail sales by 2020, fewer than half consider penetrations beyond 1% by 2020. As a result, utilities and other planning organizations have differed in their perceptions about the need to incorporate rooftop solar into resource and T&D plans. Because of this staggered progress, organizations that are just beginning to address rooftop solar can draw on innovative practices from organizations that already are incorporating rooftop solar rigorously into their plans. In this report, “Planning for a Distributed Disruption: Innovative Practices for Incorporating Distributed Solar into Utility Planning,” the researchers highlight these innovative planning approaches across nine methodological areas.
One of the challenges utilities face with incorporating solar into planning studies is that customer decisions are central to where and when rooftop solar is adopted in most cases. An innovative approach to incorporating these decisions into utility planning is to use a customer adoption model that accounts for the available rooftop space, the customer economics of rooftop solar, and the diffusion of new technologies into the market.
…[/font][/font]
