Integrated, Multi-Stakeholder Analysis of Electricity System Structures: Methodology and a Case Study

Historically, investment in power system infrastructure has been modeled from the perspective of individual utilities or a central planner, with limited consideration of the diversity of individual consumers’, individual suppliers’, and societal objectives, incentives, and actions. However, the actual power system involves a variety of stakeholders with different, and sometimes conflicting, objectives. In this article, we introduce an integrated methodology for capturing the characteristics and behavior of these multi-stakeholder systems with diverse objectives as well as its implementation in the flexible and extensible Holistic Electricity Model (HEM). HEM was developed to simultaneously analyze the interacting decisions of different stakeholders, whose objectives, decision-making processes, and constraints are all configurable. This approach enables analysts, decision makers, and other stakeholders to directly compare electricity systems in different regulatory and policy environments on a consistent basis. We illustrate HEM's capabilities in a case study of distributed photovoltaics adoption in a stylized bulk power system comprised of natural gas and utility-scale photovoltaic generators. The simultaneous and cross-comparable illustration of multiple key dynamics between stakeholders and how they depend on regulatory and policy environment demonstrates the advantages of the integrated analysis approach embodied in HEM.