The Utilities of the Future project at KAPSARC focuses on how technological disruptions from distributed energy resources (DER) are transforming the electric power industry. Advances in generation technology and cost reductions are providing customers with potentially attractive alternatives to electric utility service, perhaps turning them into ‘prosumers’. This shift may reduce the reliance on centralized generators and grid, ultimately changing the way electricity is produced, sold, transported and consumed. As a result, utilities around the world are re-evaluating their business models, and regulators are considering electricity market reforms. This project addresses the key market, regulatory and energy policy issues that need to be addressed to achieve policy objectives in a power sector with high penetration of DER.
Note: This is a repository for the utilities of the future main project within of which there will be several mini projects. Each mini project has a separate folder that includes the source code and other extra materials. Our first mini project is called Residential_PV_Adoption in which a model for solar adoption was built in Netlogo. The model describes the adoption over time of residential PV under realistic assumptions regarding consumer behavior. The second mini project is called Utility Death Spiral in which we employed an ABM approach ,codded in Python, and data from two case studies to examine the extent to which solar photovoltaic penetration can erode utility revenues and undercut the traditional financial model of power companies, leading to a so-called “death spiral” of the utility business. The third model is still under development.
Utilities of the Future is released under The MIT License. For details, see the following URLs: http://opensource.org/ and [http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT] (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
If you would like to contribute to the project, please contact us at research@kapsarc.org (please mention utilities of the future project).
Copyright © KAPSARC. Open source MIT License.