The economic opportunity of distributed smart solar systems

Leading countries around the world have charted bold strategies over the past 3 years to emerge from the global economic depression. These strategies invariably included substantial investments in Smart Grids and Renewable Technologies. Utilities, manufacturers, consultants, and developers embraced the opportunity, and demonstrated many smart technologies, new and relabeled. An innovative emerging technology that has the potential to empower the electric distribution system and its customers is the Smart Solar technology, which uniquely combines a smart grid infrastructure with reliable solar energy integration. This paper introduces the massively distributed Smart Solar technology and discusses its technical merits from a T&D utility perspective. Furthermore, the paper proposes a methodology to quantify the economic opportunity of a Smart Solar investment, along the electricity value chain, and the sensitivity of this economic opportunity to various utility economic and technical drivers. The proposed techno-economic analysis methodology should provide a valuable guidance to the utility executives to help them chart robust smart grid and renewable technology strategies to meet their stakeholder requirements.