Capturing the benefits of distributed generation

Conference · Mon Nov 01 04:00:00 EST 1999

OSTI ID:697210

Coles, L R ^[1]

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1. R.W. Beck, Inc., Indianapolis, IN (United States)

Existing and future distributed generation (DG) can provide significant benefits to customers, utilities and other service providers. For the customer, these benefits could include improved reliability, better power quality and lower costs. For the utility distribution company, these benefits could include deferral of costly distribution upgrades and local voltage support. For the region`s generation and transmission suppliers, DG can provide dependable capacity supply, relief from transmission constraints, and ancillary transmission services such as reactive supply and supplemental reserves. The promise of DG technologies is strong. The technical hurdles to capturing these benefits are being met with improved generators and with enhanced command, control, and communications technologies. However, institutional and regulatory hurdles to capturing these distributed generation benefits appear to be significant. Restructuring for retail access and the delamination of utilities into wires companies and generation companies may make it difficult to capture many of the multiple benefits of DG. Policy-makers should be aware of these factors and strive to craft policies and rules that give DG a fair change to deliver these strong benefits.

• Research Organization: Illinois Inst. of Tech., Chicago, IL (United States)
• OSTI ID: 697210
• Report Number(s): CONF-990410--PROC.-Vol.1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
DEREGULATION
DISPERSED STORAGE AND GENERATION
ENERGY POLICY
INSTITUTIONAL FACTORS
INTERCONNECTED POWER SYSTEMS