A study by Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance identified two ways distributed energy resources can reduce costs: act as non-wires alternatives to avoid investment in tranmission and distribution ($2.45 billion over ten years), and decrease peak energy costs in the wholesale market which is worth $3.01 billion.
Last week as Texas’ ERCOT grid reached its price cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour and the price map on ERCOT’s website became a solid and deep red, many energy market wonks highlighted that this is a feature, not a failure, of the market.
On June 26th, Governor Janet Mills signed new legislation to broaden customer access to net metering (known in Maine as net energy billing) and to promote distributed energy generation, including through competitive procurements for long-term contracts with the state’s transmission and distribution utilities.