Dartmouth Events

Jones Seminar: Distributed Energy Resources Under Net Energy Metering  -- Optimal decisions and adoption dynamics

 

Distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar, batteries, and flexible demands, have fundamentally transformed the energy and monetary transaction model between distribution utilities and their customers. This talk focuses on the co-optimization of behind-the-meter DERs for prosumers under the net energy metering (NEM) tariff. The DERs considered include renewable generation, flexible demands, and battery energy storage systems.

The first part of the talk introduces a novel energy management system that co-optimizes consumption and battery storage based on locally available stochastic renewable energy. This is achieved by solving a stochastic dynamic program designed to maximize the expected operational surplus. To address the exponential computational complexity of solving such programs, we propose a closed-form co-optimization algorithm with linear computational complexity. This algorithm leverages a relaxation-projection approach to a constrained stochastic dynamic program. Additionally, sufficient conditions for the optimality of the proposed solution are derived. Numerical studies demonstrate a substantial reduction in computational costs and a significantly reduced optimality gap compared to traditional approaches.

The second part of the talk use the optimized DER schedules to analyze the impact of different NEM implementations on the adoption dynamics of renewable energy technologies.