Research Themes +
Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
Strategic Initiatives +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
Publications
News +
For media inquiries,
please contact ETA
Interim Communications Manager
Kiran Julin

kjulin@lbl.gov
About Us +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

Transmission Benefit Quantification, Cost Allocation and Cost Recovery

Publication Type

Report

Date Published

12/2009

Authors

Budhraja, Vikram S, John Ballance, Jim Dyer, Fred Mobasheri, Joseph H Eto

Abstract

This project was commissioned to perform a scoping study to understand transmission benefit quantification, cost allocation, cost recovery, and project approval processes with a particular focus on recommending new methods for improved benefit quantification and cost allocation that better fits the new electric industry structure and planning environment. Research goals and objectives included:

Review methodologies currently being used for transmission project quantification.
Review and summarize benefit analysis that have been carried out for some recent transmission projects in California.
Present and summarize research results to improve benefit quantification methods for new transmission projects.
Outline approaches to apply improved benefit quantification method to: evaluate project cost effectiveness, allocate project costs among participants, and develop framework for cost recovery.

Key conclusions and research recommendations are:

Use a social rate of discount to calculate the present worth of benefits of a new major regional transmission projects rather than utility cost of capital to recognize the public good and long life attributes of transmission.
Calculate explicitly the fuel diversity benefit from integration of large renewable resources.
Utilize a stakeholder consensus approach, such as Delphi method, to assign value to some of the strategic benefits such as risk mitigation against extreme reliability and market volatility events.
Initiate research into (a) dynamic analysis to evaluate the impact on generation expansion in exporting regions (b) resource portfolios analysis to assess performance of different combination of demand response, renewables and fuel based generation, transmission and energy conservation programs, and (c) quantification of extreme event benefits (Insurance Value) in terms of reliability and reduced market volatility to estimate the benefits from the low probability/high impact events.

Journal

Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program

Year of Publication

2009