Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

This paper models the role of electricity tariffs on the long-term adoption of photovoltaic and storage technologies as well as the consequent impact on the distribution grid. An adoption model that captures the economic rationality of tariff-driven investments and considers the stochastic nature of individual consumers’ decisions is proposed. This model is then combined with a probabilistic load flow to evaluate the long-term impacts of the adoption on the voltage profiles of the distribution grid. To illustrate the methodology, different components of the electricity tariffs, including solar compensation mechanisms and time differentiation of Time-of-Use (ToU) rates, are evaluated, using a case study involving a section of a medium-voltage network with 118 nodes.