ORIGINAL REPORTING: DER grid services must be compensated for the value they deliver

True Value: To get to tomorrow's grid, DER grid services must be compensated right today; Enabling and compensating the true value of all the services storage offers is no easy matter.

Herman K. Trabish, Oct. 1, 2018 (Utility Dive)

Editor’s note: Policy debates about the locational and temporal values of distributed resources are spreading.

The accelerating transformation of the solar industry into the solar-plus-storage industry was clear at Solar Power International (SPI) 2018, making questions about the true value of aggregating the resources to serve customers and the grid more urgent. Much conference chatter surrounded getting technology, markets and policy for solar, storage and distributed energy resources (DERs) to work together. Developers that expect real market penetration to follow policy solutions brought some of the hottest questions regarding the advancement of DER. Solar-plus-storage is likely to supplant standalone solar over time. "How fast it happens depends on the underlying compensation and rate design," former Maryland public utilities commissioner Anne Hoskins, now Chief Policy Officer for leading distributed solar-plus-storage builder Sunrun told Utility Dive.

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Most storage today is at transmission system scale. But behind-the-meter storage and other DERs have grown rapidly and are forecast by industry leaders to play a bigger role. Compensation must recognize the 13 monetizable services of behind-the-meter services and grid services offered by resources paired with storage, industry leaders said in panel discussions and private interviews. As present, storage's true value proposition is only fully realized by compensation for many services not yet established in rates, contracts or utility-led programs. Compensation for customer-owned technologies' full range of capabilities will be increasingly important as developers aggregate them and seek to monetize the grid services they can deliver… click here for more

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