A fundamental policy question for distributed energy resources (DER) is whether they create system benefits shared by all utility customers in addition to being profitable for the installing customer. This question has received considerable attention in “value of DER” and net metering reform proceedings for behind-the-meter solar photovoltaics in recent years. Commercial customer-sited lithium-ion batteries with a primary use case of demand charge management are forecast to greatly increase in the coming decade due to falling storage costs, making comparison of their customer and system benefits a timely topic in DER valuation. We conduct an overview of the system benefits of standalone commercial customer-sited storage on United States’ electric tariffs and find system benefits will not be realized for many standalone commercial customer-sited storage installations in the absence of incentives for storage dispatch during the top 50–100 annual hours that drive grid infrastructure investment. Regulatory implementation of default peak pricing during a small subset of annual hours for customer-sited storage can realize additional system benefits and offer Pareto improvement. Additional transparency in regulatory estimates of these system benefits helps catalyze longer-term visions for increased competition at the retail level using DERs.

分布式能源 (DER) 的一个基本政策问题是，除了为安装客户带来利润之外，它们是否还能创造由所有公用事业客户共享的系统收益。近年来，这个问题在“分布式能源的价值”和电表背后太阳能光伏净计量改革进程中受到了相当大的关注。由于存储成本下降，预计未来十年主要用于需求充电管理的商用客户现场锂离子电池将大幅增加，这使得比较其客户和系统收益成为 DER 估值中的一个及时主题。我们概述了独立商业客户站点存储对美国电价的系统优势，并发现在前 50 名期间缺乏存储调度激励措施的情况下，许多独立商业客户站点存储安装将无法实现系统收益– 每年 100 小时，推动电网基础设施投资。在客户站点存储的一小部分年度时间内对默认峰值定价的监管实施可以实现额外的系统优势并提供帕累托改进。对这些系统收益的监管估计的额外透明度有助于促进使用 DER 在零售层面增加竞争的长期愿景。