The Private Net Benefits of Residential Solar PV: The Role of Electricity Tariffs, Tax Incentives and Rebates

Designing Compensation for Distributed Solar Generation: Is Net Metering Ever Optimal?

“…In practice, retail electricity prices often exhibit an increasing block structure whereby the marginal price of electricity increases as electricity consumption increases. Under net metering, this structure can render DG particularly attractive to households that consume large amounts of electricity (Borenstein, 2015). Future research should consider the optimal design of nonlinear retail tariff structures, taking explicit account of how a household's level of electricity consumption can affect its incentive to install solar DG capacity.…”

“…44 Formally, is chosen to ensure for , where denotes 2014) report rapid growth in the installation of 1.6% solar panels in recent years. Borenstein (2015) reports that, on average, households that engage in the DG of electricity consume more electricity than do households that do not undertake DG.…”

Prosumage of solar electricity: pros, cons, and the system perspective

“…Further, prosumage could trigger sub-optimal siting and dimensioning of individual PV systems. The size of prosumage-oriented PV systems tends to be small (Borenstein 2015), and potentially too small compared to what would be optimal from a system perspective (cf. European Commission 2015).…”

“…Bardt et al 2014, Borenstein 2015 Putting the distributional challenges into perspective, net effects may actually be rather low if offsetting factors are accounted for, such as lower renewable support payments caused by prosumage PV. 17 Likewise, a study on the particular German setting argues that distributive effects of prosumage are likely to remain limited because the actual potential for PV self-consumption in Germany is fairly low (Prognos 2016).…”

“…Eid et al (2014) demonstrate that net metering schemes, which are present in several US markets, lead to inequality problems. Such net metering schemes, which net grid feed-in and grid consumption over a specified period and, thus, work with a single meter, were introduced in California (Borenstein 2015) and several EU countries (European Commission 2015). Picciariello et al (2015) quantify crosssubsidies from prosumagers to consumers for twelve stylized US networks and find that these may become substantial, particularly in lower-density grids.…”