E – 1919 NREL Residential Solar Plus Storage Systems

In this online engineering PDH course, data from a new-construction residential community equipped with rooftop solar and storage (S+S) is analyzed to determine the electricity cost savings that customers can realize by adopting demand-side resources. Demand-side resources include rooftop solar photovoltaics, batteries, building energy management systems, energy efficiency investments, electric vehicles and other small-scale assets distributed widely over the grid. Demand-side resources can provide grid services by, for example, charging batteries at night and then discharging them during the day at times of peak demand, thus decreasing the magnitude of the peak demand that the grid must supply. Maximizing the potential of demand-side resources involves incentivizing electricity customers to use those resources in ways that benefit the broader electric grid. These incentives depend largely on the electricity cost savings that customers can realize by adopting demand-side resources. Determining these potential cost savings is a complex task, as is made apparent in the course.