Informing Energy Storage and Storage-Enabled Microgrid Project Decisions Using EPRI’s DER-VET™

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), with support from the California Energy Commission, discussed its approach to informing decision-makers about the planning and operations of energy storage and storage-enabled microgrid projects. Panelists discussed analysis frameworks, case studies, and applications of EPRI’s Distributed Energy Resource Value Estimation Tool (DER-VET™) utilized across a large array of grid applications for a variety of stakeholders—including customers, technology providers and developers, utilities, and regulators.

DER-VET™ provides a free, publicly accessible, open-source platform for calculating, understanding, and optimizing the value of distributed energy resources (DER) based on their technical merits and constraints. An extension of EPRI’s StorageVET® tool, DER-VET supports site-specific assessments of energy storage and additional DER technologies—including solar, wind, demand response, electric vehicle charging, internal combustion engines, and combined heat and power—in different configurations, such as microgrids. It uses load and other data to determine optimal size, duration, and other characteristics for maximizing benefits based on site conditions and the value that can be extracted from targeted use cases. Customers, developers, utilities, and regulators across the industry can apply this tool to inform project-level decisions based on sound technical understanding and unbiased cost-performance data. DER-VET was developed with funding from the California Energy Commission.

Panelists:

• Mike Gravely, California Energy Commission
• Hatice Gecol, California Energy Commission
• Giovanni Damato, Electric Power Research Institute
• Ramakrishnan Ravikumar, Electric Power Research Institute
• Miles Evans, Electric Power Research Institute
• Andrew Etringer, Electric Power Research Institute
• Anna Adamsson, Clean Energy States Alliance (moderator)

This webinar was a presentation of the Energy Storage Technology Advancement Partnership (ESTAP). ESTAP is a federal-state funding and information sharing project that aims to accelerate the deployment of electrical energy storage technologies in the U.S. ESTAP is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity, managed by Sandia National Laboratories, and administered by the Clean Energy States Alliance.