Distributed Solar Utility Tariff and Revenue Impact Analysis: A Guidebook for International Practitioners

Around the world, there has been increasing interest in understanding the impacts of prospective and emerging distributed photovoltaic (DPV) programs on utilities and ratepayers. This guidebook has been assembled to provide clear direction to policymakers, regulators, utilities, and researchers in designing and executing a DPV utility tariff and revenue impact analysis (TRIA), with some special considerations offered for doing so in developing and emerging economy environments with lower availability of utility sector data. 

This guidebook provides a methodological approach for quantifying the net financial impact of DPV on utilities (in the form of “net revenue losses”) and ratepayers (in the form of “net tariff impacts”). The approach for calculating net revenue losses can be applied in nearly any utility jurisdiction, regardless of institutional arrangements, business models, or regulatory paradigms. The approach for calculating net tariff impacts works best in settings where some form of cost-based economic utility regulation is present (i.e., settings where there is an established policy or regulatory mechanism to pass through changes in utility costs to ratepayers).