A New Selection Tool of Retail Electric Provider for Prosumers With Local Distributed Resources and Plug-in Electric Vehicles

This study addresses the issue of identifying the most suitable retail electric provider plan for the residential customers that are consumers only as well as consumers who intend to become prosumers. The main objective is to develop a methodology that will assist the residential customers in identifying the most suitable distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar photovoltaic and home battery storage as well as electric vehicles. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is used to develop a decision support tool that aims to determine the appropriate retail electric provider plan that will ensure maximum savings on the customer's energy bill. The results of implementing the proposed methodology on case studies from Texas have shown that the residential customers can achieve significant savings if they install rooftop solar photovoltaic. The results have also shown that the maximum savings are usually associated with the time-variant or time-invariant plans, in case of customers with low energy usage, reaching up to $221/year. On the other hand, the customers with high energy usage were found to achieve significant savings on their energy bills when they are on the tiered time-invariant plans, in which case the savings may reach up to $475/year.