Mechanisms and Policies for Controlling Distributed Solar Capacity

The rapid expansion of intermittent grid-tied solar capacity is making the job of balancing electricity’s real-time supply and demand increasingly challenging. Recent work proposes mechanisms for actively controlling solar power in the grid at individual sites by enabling software to cap it as a fraction of its time-varying maximum output. However, while enforcing an equal fraction of each solar site’s time-varying maximum output results in “fair” short-term contributions of solar power across all sites, it does not result in “fair” long-term contributions of solar energy. Enforcing fair long-term energy access is important when controlling distributed solar capacity, since limits on solar output impact the compensation users receive for net metering and the battery capacity required to store excess solar energy. This discrepancy arises from fundamental differences in enforcing “fair” access to the grid to contribute solar energy, compared to analogous fair sharing in networks and processors. To address the problem, we first present both a centralized and distributed algorithm to enable control of distributed solar capacity that enforces fair grid energy access. We then present multiple policies that show how utilities can leverage this new distributed rate-limiting mechanism to reduce variations in grid demand from intermittent solar generation.