Fortnightly Top Innovators 2018
Yi Li is Senior Engineer – Distribution Operation, PPL Electric Utilities.
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and President of Lines Up, Inc.
PUF: What's this project on integrating DERs?
Yi Li: Just speaking on the product perspective, our project covers extensive scopes. Outside the development and integration of a DER management system, we are also building a customer facing DER interconnection web portal.
Also, to fully vet the development and end use cases, we have a customer-engagement pilot. The pilot's intent is to communicate with inverters that have monitoring capabilities via DER management system.
At PPL, we have a very large and cross business function team working on this project, including folks from engineering, operations, customer service, information technology and many other groups. We are all working toward this centralized project with the objective to coordinate DER integration into the system from the aspect of the application enhancement, impact-analysis, operations and engineering perspectives.
PUF: What was the toughest item to achieve here?