Distributed energy resources can provide key opportunities that would empower India’s retail customers to improve system efficiency, lower costs, and reduce emissions. In the first part of our DER series, we laid out the arguments for how deploying distributed energy resources (DER) in scale provides a key opportunity to empower customers.

DERs include elements such as energy efficiency, demand response, storage resources, distributed generation closer to load (such as rooftop solar), and more. DERs help customers modify their electric usage in ways that will save them money, offer reliability products to electric wholesale system operators and discoms to increase reliability and efficiency of the system, and help reduce emissions. The promotion of DERs, however, requires affirmative action by utility regulators and policy makers.

In the second part our series, we outline policies that will facilitate the entry of DER providers.