Data-driven planning of distributed energy resources amidst socio-technical complexities

Rishee K. Jain (), Junjie Qin and Ram Rajagopal ()
Additional contact information
Rishee K. Jain: Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2)
Junjie Qin: Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2)
Ram Rajagopal: Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2)

Nature Energy, 2017, vol. 2, issue 8, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract New distributed energy resources (DER) are rapidly replacing centralized power generation due to their environmental, economic and resiliency benefits. Previous analyses of DER systems have been limited in their ability to account for socio-technical complexities, such as intermittent supply, heterogeneous demand and balance-of-system cost dynamics. Here we develop ReMatch, an interdisciplinary modelling framework, spanning engineering, consumer behaviour and data science, and apply it to 10,000 consumers in California, USA. Our results show that deploying DER would yield nearly a 50% reduction in the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) over the status quo even after accounting for socio-technical complexities. We abstract a detailed matching of consumers to DER infrastructure from our results and discuss how this matching can facilitate the development of smart and targeted renewable energy policies, programmes and incentives. Our findings point to the large-scale economic and technical feasibility of DER and underscore the pertinent role DER can play in achieving sustainable energy goals.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017112 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natene:v:2:y:2017:i:8:d:10.1038_nenergy.2017.112

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nenergy/

DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.112

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Energy is currently edited by Fouad Khan

More articles in Nature Energy from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().