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Energy planners and regulators have traditionally valued the health benefits of energy efficiency and renewable energy at zero — because these benefits do not flow to energy users in proportion to usage and because decision-makers had no simple and feasible way to estimate them. But recent work by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an important step fo...
In a recent special issue of The Electricity Journal guest-edited by RAP staff, authors tackled various aspects of the topic of energy optimization. RAP brought together three of the authors who contributed to the special issue for a webinar conversation: Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy; Sue Coakley, execut...
The rapid growth in distributed energy resources (DERs) has delivered benefits for residential customers, businesses and utilities. This accelerating worldwide spread has also created a challenge that regulators recognize: how to determine the value of these resources for the grid, for customers and for the public as a whole and then how to measure benefits and c...
In a webinar on Sept. 10, John Shenot and Dr. Carl Linvill looked more in depth at the types of value streams that combinations of distributed energy resources can create and discussed how best to compensate the owners of these resources. They highlighted use cases that demonstrate why customers might consider pairing resources such as solar and storage, and p...
Much has been written about the value of solar photovoltaic generation, but less about the value of some of the other distributed energy resources — other forms of distributed generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, demand response, and energy efficiency — or how these resources can be combined. This paper considers the types of values (or “value st...
This paper was written to assist the Public Service Commission of Arkansas as it seeks to remove barriers to entry for aggregators of distributed energy resources (DERs), encourage customer participation—the key to the success of DERs —and incentivize utility cooperation and support. Additionally, the Arkansas Commission was interested in the sale of aggregat...
Rapid technology change means cleaner, lower-cost, and more resilient options for meeting customers’ energy needs are or soon will be available. Customers may soon have cost-effective options to meet their own energy needs through transactive platforms and markets. How can utility regulators best prepare for this changing world? On February 8, 2018, RAP host...
