Strengthening Procedures
Gwen Brown is Vice President of Communications at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
As data centers and other loads like building electrification drive increased demand for electricity at a rate unprecedented in recent decades, utilities and regulators face a challenge to deploy more electricity generation quickly while avoiding or limiting rate increases for customers.
Distributed energy resources (DERs) are emerging as a key solution to this challenge because they can be constructed quickly compared to other sources of generation (such as natural gas power plants). They also have the added benefit for utility customers of offering a way to control energy costs.
In this context, it is all the more important to ensure that DERs can interconnect to the grid efficiently and that interconnection policies do not create unnecessary barriers to their timely and affordable connection. A recent report from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) offers a starting point for regulators evaluating options to strengthen their states’ interconnection procedures.
The State of DER Interconnection in the U.S.
In May, IREC released the latest issue of its “Freeing the Grid” interconnection grades, which evaluates the quality of each U.S. state’s interconnection rules against current best practices for DER interconnection.