About the Distributed Generation Market Demand Model

A map of the United States is colored to show the amount of solar energy received each day on average. The Southwest shows the most energy, followed by the Southeast. The Northern parts of the country show less daily solar energy.

The dGen model uses a range of spatial inputs, such as average costs of electricity, wind resources, and solar resources (pictured here), to inform its calculations.

NREL developed the Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen™) model to analyze the key factors that will affect future market demand for distributed solar, wind, storage, geothermal, and other distributed energy resource (DER) technologies in the United States within a single modeling platform.

The dGen model is one of the premier national customer adoption models available. It distinguishes itself from other models in two ways:

  1. All data are embedded in a spatially resolved database, which permits analysis at multiple geographic levels (national, state, and utility, or below).
  2. Customer adoption is modeled through a bottoms-up agent-based approach that permits sophistication in representation of decision-making regarding economic and behavioral considerations.

For examples of dGen analysis, see model applications.

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