The Right Tone of VOS: Improving the Argument for Local Community Solar
Abstract
This paper describes an alternative to the typical value-of-solar (VOS) analytic approach for supporting utility acquisition of local, distributed solar, relative to centralized solar resources. The specific context is resource acquisition for a community-solar program. The utility in this case could acquire (by ownership or power contract) solar from a centralized solar project for a relatively low cost, or it could include a portfolio of local, commercial-scale solar projects with higher “sticker price,” but strategic benefits. This case sheds light on the utility’s internal-stakeholder debate and on the limitations of detailed bottom-up VOS analysis for some kinds of utility solar decisions. The recommended approach involves building a qualitative, strategic argument, which focuses on relatively few calculated values—three in this case, including strategicdesign improvement, reduced transmission costs, and customer-retention value. In other cases, other values or ranges of values might be used. The objective is to apply analytics sparingly
Keywords
Community solar, Value of solar, Vos, Der, Utility solar, Distributed solar, Strategic solar