Distribution Investment Prioritization and Justification

To achieve this, the paper draws on research conducted, including surveys of 10 U.S. DSOs, interviews, and collaborative discussions through industry forums. It reviews existing prioritisation methods such as risk-based scoring, benefit-cost analysis, and emerging valuemodel approaches that translate risks and benefits into a common economic scale. The paper also examines the metrics currently used to evaluate candidate investments across categories such as capacity, reliability, safety, compliance, and customer impact, highlighting the complexity and challenges of comparing dissimilar investments and the limitations of current tools and data.

The results reveal that while DSOs commonly refresh multi-year investment plans annually and apply structured prioritisation processes, significant challenges persist. These include constrained budgets, inconsistent metrics, difficulty quantifying benefits, stakeholder scepticism, and process complexity. The paper identifies research opportunities to address these gaps, including developing transparent, data-driven metrics, advancing value-model methodologies, and creating multi-objective planning frameworks. It concludes that improving prioritisation practices and fostering industry collaboration are critical for enabling DSOs to optimise investment portfolios that support safe, reliable, resilient and affordable decarbonisation.