  The emergence of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) provides both challenges
and opportunities for the planning and operations of distribution systems.
These resources can be deployed in a manner that is either complementary to or
in competition with traditional network operations and planning as the DERs can
provide numerous important services to grid operators and utilities. This paper
presents a novel method to estimate the trade off between DERs and traditional
investments using a dynamic Peak-Load Pricing (PLP) methodology. PLP is a
pricing strategy for a time-dependent quantity of a non-storable commodity and
is based on the theory of long-run marginal costs. Importantly PLP deals with
the trade-off between capacity utilization and consumer welfare. Therefore, the
capacity price is set at a point where the cost of investment is exactly offset
by the additional social welfare that the investment would bring. Importantly
it allows for capital cost recovery with no uplift payments. This dynamic PLP
methodology is an interactive planning and operations model based on the
Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems (DyMonDS) Framework which helps to
align physical, information, and economic incentives across many stakeholders
within the electric energy system. The DyMonDS framework helps to solve the
drawbacks of PLP, which are related to the computational complexity of the PLP
models considering different technologies with different payback periods over a
long investment horizon. Results show that the dynamic PLP model can accurately
value the impact of different technologies in reducing congestion and
increasing the number of customers served. This allows the network operator to
easily identify which technologies should be chosen in each investment cycle.
