The US Department of Energy (DoE) has awarded a $2m contract to the Electric Power Research Institute (Epri) to investigate the co-adoption of solar, energy storage and electric vehicles.

Epri will explore how information about solar energy spreads among consumers.

The DoE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (Seto) selected Epri to examine how residential and commercial utility customers make decisions related to the co-adoption of solar power with other technologies, such as energy storage and electric vehicles (EVs). This research will help utilities determine future needs of the electric grid.

In collaboration with the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Epri will assess residential and commercial customer preferences, influences and decision-making for co-adopting solar photovoltaics with energy storage and/or EVs. The interplay among these three distributed energy resource (DER) technologies can provide consumers and businesses flexibility in the way they use energy.

Without a clearer understanding of the customer motivations for owning and operating multiple DERs, utilities may not fully anticipate and prepare for the grid impacts of DER co-adoption.

“With this research, Epri will understand, and be able to communicate to utilities, customer DER co-adoption preferences, motivations and barriers,” said Rob Chapman, senior vice president at Epri. “Understanding these behaviours will better prepare the electric industry as consumers and utilities move towards a clean energy future.”

Epri was selected as a part of the Seto Fiscal Year 2020 funding programme, an effort to advance research and development projects that will lower solar electricity costs, increase the competitiveness of American solar manufacturing and businesses, improve the reliability and resilience of the grid, and expand solar to new applications.

“This project will help enhance long-term forecasting tools, such as NREL’s open source dGen adoption model,” said Ben Sigrin, researcher at NREL. “We anticipate the industry benefiting from tools that can model the impact of complex customer decision making related to co-adoption, instead of relying on tools that model customer adoption of individual technologies in silos.”

Epri is one of several projects examining how the flow of solar information can reduce the non-hardware costs of solar energy. By finding ways to deliver knowledge efficiently to key stakeholders, decisions can be made more quickly and effectively.

Epri has launched this three-year project to identify customer DER co-adoption preferences.

Epri conducts research and development relating to the generation, delivery and use of electricity for the benefit of the public. An independent, non-profit organisation, it brings together its scientists and engineers as well as experts from academia and industry to help address challenges in electricity, including reliability, efficiency, affordability, health, safety and the environment. Its members represent 90% of the electricity generated and delivered in the USA with international participation extending to 40 countries. Principal offices and laboratories are in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Massachusetts and Washington DC.