Customer Capacity Allocation Aware Hosting Capacity and Its Contribution to Upgrade Cost Allocation

PV Hosting Capacity helps understand the amount of PV that the electric grid can accommodate without the need for any changes to grid infrastructure. Moreover, PV capacity that a customer can adopt depends not only on their load, but also on the location and amount of other existing PV on the grid. This paper introduces the concept of a customer capacity allocation aware hosting capacity, which helps understand the amount of PV relative to the peak load that each customer can host without causing violations on the grid. Currently, new customers are more likely to trigger upgrade costs. This paper also discusses an upgrade-cost allocation method that accounts for system benefits as well as customer benefits. The framework and concepts introduced in this paper are the beginning of a crucial discussion regarding upgrade cost allocation, that can ensure that all customers have access to deploy PV and other distributed generation on the electric grid.