Distributed Energy Resources in Practice: A Case Study Analysis and Validation of LBNL's Customer Adoption Model

Abstract

This report describes a Berkeley Lab effort to model the economics andoperation of small-scale (‹500 kW) on-site electricity generators based on real-world installations at several example customer sites. This work builds upon the previous developmentof the Distributed Energy Resource Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), a tool designed to find theoptimal combination of installed equipment, and idealized operating schedule, that would minimizethe site’s energy bills, given performance and cost data on available DER technologies, utility tariffs, and site electrical and thermal loads over a historic test period, usually a recent year.This study offered the first opportunity to apply DER-CAM in a real-world setting and evaluate itsmodeling results.