Impact of Rate Design Alternatives on Residential Solar Customer Bills. Increased Fixed Charges, Minimum Bills and Demand-based Rates

Bird, Lori¹  Davidson, Carolyn¹  McLaren, Joyce¹  Miller, John¹ 

[1] National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

关键词: customer demand;    PV generation;    grid exports;    demand-based rates;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1225307
RP-ID  :  NREL/TP--6A20-64850
PID  :  OSTI ID: 1225307

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

With rapid growth in energy efficiency and distributed generation, electric utilities are anticipating stagnant or decreasing electricity sales, particularly in the residential sector. Utilities are increasingly considering alternative rates structures that are designed to recover fixed costs from residential solar photovoltaic (PV) customers with low net electricity consumption. Proposed structures have included fixed charge increases, minimum bills, and increasingly, demand rates - for net metered customers and all customers. This study examines the electricity bill implications of various residential rate alternatives for multiple locations within the United States. For the locations analyzed, the results suggest that residential PV customers offset, on average, between 60% and 99% of their annual load. However, roughly 65% of a typical customer's electricity demand is non-coincidental with PV generation, so the typical PV customer is generally highly reliant on the grid for pooling services.