Research demonstrates that distributed energy resources can postpone infrastructure improvements in electric grids, suggesting cost-effective alternatives.
Electric utilities and regulators increasingly view distributed energy resources (DERs)—such as energy efficiency, demand response, distributed solar PV, distributed storage, and managed electric vehicle (EV) charging—as tools that can defer (postpone) or sometimes avoid traditional "wires" investments in transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure. The modern framing is typically "non-wires solutions/alternatives" (NWS/NWAs): strategically deployed DER portfolios that provide location-specific, time-specific, and reliability-qualified load relief or grid services so that a planned line, transformer, feeder, or substation upgrade can be shifted to a later year (National Energy Screening Project, 2020; U.S. Department of Energy, 2022).
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Samuel Nimaful (2024) studied this question.
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