Assessing the impact of household PV systems on the profits of all electricity industry participants

The recent rapid growth in distributed PV deployment within countries including Australia is now raising important and challenging questions regarding the societal value of PV and the most appropriate policy options to drive appropriate deployment. A key issue is how the costs and benefits of PV systems are currently shared between different industry participants including of course customers who deploy PV, but also their retailers and network service providers and, more broadly again, other energy customers and large centralized generation. The interaction of different PV support policies such as feed-in tariffs is a further complication. This paper presents a study attempting to estimate the operational revenue and costs associated with household PV systems for these industry participants within the Australian State of NSW under current market arrangements and PV support policies. Our results suggest that customer deployment of PV seems likely to have most impacts on the operating profits of their retailers but potentially significant adverse impacts on their distribution network service providers. The methodology and results has potentially important implications for retail market arrangements and PV policy support.