Granular Compensation, Information, and Carbon Pricing Promote DER Deployment

Abstract: The socially efficient deployment of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), e.g., rooftop solar, depends on the underlying retail electricity policies. Current debates on DER policies, including Net Energy Metering (NEM) variants, center around developing value-reflective compensation policies that can expedite DER deployment while preventing potential cost shifts between DER adopters and non-adopters. However, these debates mostly ignore the temporally- and spatially- granular value of DERs, market failures (e.g., information asymmetry among DER stakeholders) and externalities (e.g., carbon-dioxide emissions). In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic approach with information asymmetry to examine efficiency implications of adopting granular DER compensation policies, e.g., value stacks and distributional locational marginal price, instead of NEM with flat retail rates. We show that granular compensation policies result in more efficient market outcomes than under NEM, even in the presence of information asymmetry, thus avoiding the need for interventions. Combined with granular DER compensation, carbon pricing provides the most accurate price signal to DER investors/aggregators, and leads to the highest social welfare.