Treatment of Solar Generation in Electric Utility Resource Planning (Presentation): NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Today's utility planners have a different market and economic context than their predecessors, including planning for the growth of renewable energy. Through interviews and a questionnaire, the authors gathered information on utility supply planning and how solar is represented. Utilities were asked to provide their resource planning process details, key assumptions (e.g. whether DG is represented as supply or negative load), modeling methodology (e.g. type of risk analytics and candidate portfolio development), capacity expansion and production simulation model software, and solar project representation (project size, capacity value and integration cost adder). This presentation aims to begin the exchange of information between utilities, regulators and other stakeholders by capturing utility-provided information about: 1) how various utilities approach long-range resource planning; 2) methods and tools utilities use to conduct resource planning; and, 3) how solar technologies are considered in the resource planning process.