Calibration of electricity tariff for grid operator revenue conservation regardless of PV penetration

A high penetration of intermittent electricity generation from photovoltaic source, could lead to power curtailment, in order to avoid overloads of the transmission lines, thus reducing the efficiency of the grid. This project focuses on a potential way to alleviate this strain on the grid, by introducing two tariff structures and using tariff calibration to attend securing the total revenue of the DSO, in charge of the proper maintenance of the grid. Two tariff structures are taken into consideration in this project. A fully volumetric-tariff structure and a fully capacity-based tariff structure, dependent on the monthly maximum power imported. These scenarios are applied to a case-study in a neighborhood of 41 buildings in Rolle, Switzerland. An iterative calibration process and a convex optimization are applied for both tariff structures. The results show a 370% increase of grid tariff for the volumetric-based structure, and a 48% increase for the capacity-based structure, after the installation of solar panels and storage technologies of different sizes in every building of the neighborhood. This shows that, even though volumetric-based tariffs are more common worldwide, they are more volatile. The results also show that capacity-based tariff could somewhat alleviate the strain put on the grid due to PV penetration, compared to volumetric-based tariff.