Recent groundbreaking work done at Southern California Edison, Central Hudson Gas & Electric, and elsewhere, provides valuable inputs to a new report, titled “Beyond the Meter: Addressing the Locational Valuation Challenge for Distributed Energy Resources.”
The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) issued the report in September 2016, in collaboration with Nexant. It is part of SEPA’s comprehensive ongoing series of research reports in key DER related areas.
The report does an excellent job of fulfilling the promise in its subtitle: “Establishing a Common Metric for Locational Value.” The second report in SEPA’s Beyond the Meter series suggests three key steps “for this transition to be truly smart and deliver on the promise of these advanced technologies” to be successful:
- First, utilities must also better understand and proactively engage with consumers.
- Second, they need to enhance their existing planning processes, applying to the distribution system the level of sophistication used in bulk power system planning and operations.
- Finally, they need to make a strategic, organization-wide commitment to deploying and integrating these technologies, and examining how these changes may affect the fundamentals of their business models.
Regardless of a utility’s current mandate or position across these three suggested steps in the near term with their DER initiatives, utility personnel involved in distribution system planning and those with interests in optimizing the economic value of DER solutions will find a depth of helpful detail and analysis in this report.
** From: “Beyond the Meter: Addressing the Locational Valuation Challenge for Distributed Energy Resources.” Page 17
With free online registration the SEPA report is available at this link: “Beyond the Meter: Addressing the Locational Valuation Challenge for Distributed Energy Resources.”
