On The Benefits of Behind-the-Meter Rooftop Solar and Energy Storage: The Importance of Retail Rate Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the impact of retail rate design on the investment incentives, avoided utility costs, and cost shifting concerns associated with rooftop solar and rooftop solar plus battery storage systems that are located behind-the-meter. We consider recently proposed changes to California's time-of-use pricing policy for commercial and industrial consumers which shifts on-peak prices from midday hours to the network constrained evening hours. We find that the shift in on-peak hours decreases investment in rooftop solar and has an ambiguous effect on storage investment. We demonstrate that storage reduces utility network costs, but the magnitude of this effect varies critically with the prevailing retail rate structure. Importantly, we show that a shift in the on-peak period to the constrained evening hours does not always elevate the avoided network cost associated with a battery system when demand charges are imposed on a consumer's private maximum demand. We illustrate that this issue can be alleviated by imposing demand charges on consumption that arises in system-constrained hours. We find that cost-shifting concerns are substantially reduced under the proposed rates and tariffs that have a heavy reliance on demand charges. We illustrate that while storage reduces the utility's costs, it can also increase cost-shifting concerns. These findings demonstrate the potential trade-offs between maximizing avoided costs and minimizing cost-shifting concerns under commonly employed retail rate structures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".