Interconnection Grades Offer Insight to Bring DERs Online Faster
This article was originally published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.
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.
“Freeing the Grid” includes a report card for each state. A state’s overall grade highlights how well its interconnection rules perform against current best practices, while its report card details performance across ten different categories of evaluation criteria that the grade is based on. The report card also provides specific recommendations for how the state’s rules can be improved.
Since the last release of “Freeing the Grid” in 2023, four states made interconnection policy improvements that were significant enough to earn higher grades, with the most notable improvements in New Jersey, Oregon, and Maine, followed by Wisconsin. As in 2023, New Mexico received the sole “A” in the report, having adopted a majority of current best practices in its interconnection rules.
“Freeing the Grid” finds that most states have significant room for improvement in their interconnection procedures to ensure that they do not create unnecessary barriers to DER interconnection. A large majority of states scored a “C” or below, including a quarter of all states that lack statewide interconnection rules altogether.
The good news is that there are many resources available that provide a strong starting point for adopting stronger interconnection procedures, including model rules and the recommendations in “Freeing the Grid.”
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