Residential electricity customers are increasingly pairing battery storage with distributed solar panels under net metering. The caveat is that these solar plus storage customers can be subject to different retail electricity pricing rules depending on their locations. We study the impact of common retail electricity pricing rules on customer benefit, utility profits as well as the environment. To do so, we first establish the solar plus storage customer's optimal policy under different pricing rules, and analyze the utility profits subject to that policy. We find that solar plus storage customers and the utility can be better off under the same or different pricing rules depending on the batttery adoption level and some market condition. Using rich real-life data, we calibrate our model and verify our findings.

This is a joint work with Assoc. Prof. Nur Sunar and Prof. Jayashankar Swaminathan.