Date
Monday, November 13, 2023
Time
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Name
Co-adoption of Solar, Storage, and/or Electric Vehicles by Residential and Commercial Customers
Session ID BECC
B1 - Why We Decarbonize (Or Don't)
Track
Social Science Insights
Margaret Taylor
Description

Households and businesses are increasingly adopting two or more of the distributed energy resources (DERs) of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, battery energy storage systems, and electric vehicles (EVs), with their complementary charging equipment. This “co-adoption” occurs either concurrently or in a sequence influenced by changing consumer preferences, resources, and/or DER value propositions, such as those that occur with evolving DER attributes like cost and performance. Utility planning studies, which must estimate how much and where DERs are located downstream of each substation, would benefit from the improved forecasting accuracy that a more complete understanding of co-adoption patterns would provide. These more accurate studies would inform utility integrated resource plans, enhancing electric service reliability and affordability. This presentation discusses the results of significant new surveys of the DER co-adoption preferences of U.S. residential and commercial utility customers, which were implemented in the spring of 2023. For each customer type, both a national survey and an over-sample survey were conducted, with the over-sample occurring within the service territories of eight utilities. For the national survey, residential customers were recruited through a representative panel (n~=4,000), while commercial customers (n~=700) were recruited through email solicitations and follow-up telephone calls to reach the appropriate decision-makers. Embedded in each survey were discrete choice experiments (DCEs) which elicited the stated preferences of customers in a utility function formulation of future use in improving DER forecasting models. The results discussed in this presentation include deep-dives into both residential and commercial customer co-adoption decision-making across the country, as well as into how these customer types compare and contrast with each other. Not only does this presentation break new ground by considering DER co-adoption, it also contributes to the relatively sparse literature on commercial DER decision-making.

Supporting Document 1