This effort represents a contribution to the wider distributed energy resources (DER) research of the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS, http://certs.lbl.gov) that is intended to attack and, hopefully, resolve the technical barriers to DER adoption, particularly those that are unlikely to be of high priority to individual equipment vendors. The longer term goal of the Berkeley Lab effort is to guide the wider technical research towards the key technical problems by forecasting some likely patterns of DER adoption. In sharp contrast to traditional electricity utility planning, this work takes a customer-centric approach and focuses on DER adoption decision making at, what we currently think of as, the customer level. This study reports on Berkeley Lab's second year effort (completed in Federal fiscal year 2000, FY00) of a project aimed to anticipate patterns of customer adoption of distributed energy resources (DER). Marnay, et al., 2000 describes the earlier FY99 Berkeley Lab work. The results presented herein are not intended to represent definitive economic analyses of possible DER projects by any means. The paucity of data available and the importance of excluded factors, such as environmental implications, are simply too important to make such an analysis possible at this time. Rather, the work presented represents a demonstration of the current model and an indicator of the potential to conduct more relevant studies in the future.
