Dist PV capacity and generation profiles

[gschivley]

In a previous discussion question, @wesleyjcole said that a single weather year of distributed PV profiles was scaled across multiple weather years. It looks like the 2025.1.0 update added profiles for each BA from 2007-2023.

1. Do these profiles get paired with county-level capacity in the scenario-specific distpvcap files, and all counties in a BA get the same profile?
2. The county-level distpv files are from Standard Scenarios 2023. Mid-case results sum to 108 GW, which is much lower than the 173 GW reported in the Standard Scenarios dashboard. Is there a reason for the discrepancy?
3. The 2024 Standard Scenario results were released in January and total distPV capacity is down to 96 GW. Is there a plan to update ReEDS inputs? Normally I'd just take the 2024 results and pair them with the new CF profiles, but I'm not sure if there is some processing step that intentionally produced the drop in capacity noted above.

Greg

[wesleyjcole]

Good questions here. Responses below.

1. We did just add hourly profiles for rooftop PV. The BA-level profiles are in the repository. County-level profiles are at https://data.openei.org/submissions/8379. When running at BA resolution the county-level capacities are summed to the BA level, and then use the BA profiles.
2. The dGen projections for the 2023 Standard Scenarios were not ready until after the 2023 Standard Scenarios was published, so the published 2023 Standard Scenarios used an older version of the dGen projections.
3. The input distpv data is in MW_DC and ReEDS reports the outputs (including in the Standard Scenario viewer) in MW_AC. The inverter loading ratio for distpv is 1.1 (see https://github.com/NREL/ReEDS-2.0/blob/a3548b51b5fe2b788b581500420b864d27b7c547/inputs/scalars.csv#L45), so the capacity needs adjusted by that ratio. It does look like we have an issue where the aggregated region in Pennsylvania (z122) is dropping the distpv capacity, so there is a 2.3 GW discrepancy in 2050 that looks like a bug, so we'll get that addressed.

[wesleyjcole]

Just to follow up on the third question -- the 2.3 GW discrepancy in 2050 in distPV has been resolved, so while the bug was in the 2024 Standard Scenarios version, it is not in the current version.

[gschivley]

The dGen projections for the 2023 Standard Scenarios were not ready until after the 2023 Standard Scenarios was published, so the published 2023 Standard Scenarios used an older version of the dGen projections.

To clarify, does this mean that even though the files with dg capacity all start with distpvcap_stscen2023 they actually align with results from the 2024 Standard Scenarios? The 108.1 GWdc in 2050 from mid_case is close to the 2024 Standard Scenarios Mid Case, Current Policies 98.5 GWac (96.2 plus the 2.3 GW discrepancy you mentioned) with an ILR of 1.1.

[wesleyjcole]

The distpv capacity inputs that start with distpvcap_stscen2023 were created for the 2023 Standard Scenarios, but were not available in time for use in the 2023 Standard Scenarios. They are therefore aligned with the 2023 Standard Scenarios. In particular, the electricity prices passed from ReEDS to dGen were from a 2023 model version, and behind-the-meter policies in dGen were based on policies as they were in 2023. These distpvcap_stscen2023 scenarios were used without modification for the 2024 Standard Scenarios as we did not create new dGen runs in 2024 for the Standard Scenarios. Happy to try to clarify further if that isn't clear.