As infrastructure ages and more governments and utilities are moving away from fossil fuels, the need for Distributed Energy Resources grows. Currently, it’s difficult for grid operators to know what kinds of DERs will have the most impact on any given area, both economically and environmentally, and what will be most effective for utilities themselves.

Well, a group of Stanford University researchers, can help. The trio created a program called “ReMatch” that uses smart grid data to match different consumer segments with different kinds of distributed resources (including solar panels, natural gas-fired microturbines, stationary batteries and alternative cooling). ReMatch bases its recommendations on the customer’s use of energy and the ability to construct resources in a certain area.

The group applied ReMatch to a 10,000 customer test group in California, using real hourly data collected from smart meters. The models found that by creating DER infrastructure in very targeted ways reduced the Levelized Cost of Electricity (the present value of the resource over its lifetime costs) by nearly 50%, due to the dramatic reduction in operating costs that the utility incurs. The whole study was published in Nature Energy. To read more, see the article in ARS Technica.

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