The Texas Clean Energy Coalition (TCEC) released a report from The Brattle Group, detailing the growth of distributed energy resources (DER) in ERCOT

Between 2015 and 2017 DER in ERCOT increased by 62%, and by the end of 2018, there were about 1,300 MW of DERs in ERCOT, the report said

Small DER of less than 1 MW, primarily rooftop solar installations and some natural gas-powered microgrids, is not required to be reported. "However, based on the small <1 MW DER that was reported to ERCOT, the category nearly doubled between mid-2016 and the end of 2018. Throughout 2018, most unregistered new small DER <1 MW was solar," the report said

The report said that, "Since future DER growth in ERCOT is likely to include many of these small, non-registered customer-sited solar PV and battery installations, further stakeholder engagement is needed to explore ways to fully and appropriately compensate them for excess energy produced, thus incentivizing more development of DER."

"While these generators save their hosts money and their excess generation is valuable to the system, those values may not be fully compensated," the report said

"[I]t is important that any compensation plan should recognize the value of DER to the system and avoid cost shifting so that DER can contribute to the ERCOT grid," the report said

The report urged the exploration of the implications of a three-tiered approach to integrating DER and other new technologies. The report set forth the following considerations:

• Competitive market – support competition and customer choice, and let the market provide solutions to system problems.

• Non-wires alternatives – if the market is not solving a pressing problem, e.g. a system reliability problem, utilities should consider non-wires alternatives (NWAs) such as distributed generation, energy storage, EE/DR, or grid software and controls to defer or replace the need for traditional investments by reducing load at certain locations; moreover, utilities should be able to invest in NWAs on an equal regulatory footing with traditional infrastructure investments.

• Regulated solutions – if neither the market nor NWAs can solve a pressing problem, utilities can propose a regulated solution such as physical assets and non-traditional technologies including microgrids, DR and battery storage.

See the report here