National Forum on Inverter Grid Integration
The Forum on Inverter Grid Integration Issues (FIGII) is an ad-hoc consortium of technical experts from inverter manufacturers, national labs, utilities and consultants. It seeks to address long-term barriers to high penetration of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DER). A Guide to Selecting Inverters and Settings in Jurisdictions Without Grid Support Functionality Requirements is a new…
The Forum on Inverter Grid Integration Issues (FIGII) is an ad-hoc consortium of technical experts from inverter manufacturers, national labs, utilities and consultants. It seeks to address long-term barriers to high penetration of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DER).
A Guide to Selecting Inverters and Settings in Jurisdictions Without Grid Support Functionality Requirements is a new document created by the consortium in April 2019. It is intended to help inform utilities choosing to provide specific requirements to ensure inverters are correctly selected and commissioned.
These requirements might exist in utility technical interconnection requirements, technical manuals, interconnection handbooks or addenda. The intended reader is likely a utility engineer tasked with creating or updating such requirements, in light of expanded inverter capabilities now available on the market.
The primary contact for FIGII and the guide available below is Brian Lydic, chief regulatory engineer for IREC. He can be reached at: at [email protected].
FIGII started out addressing effective grounding requirements in 2013 and eventually created test procedures that were used by NREL to characterize inverters’ contribution to ground fault overvoltage.
This research laid the foundation for the development of IEEE C62.92.6-2017 IEEE Guide for Application of Neutral Grounding in Electrical Utility Systems, Part VI – Systems Supplied by Current-Regulated Sources. Similar tests will be included in IEEE 1547.1 to help deepen the understanding of inverter fault response.
FIGII acts as a venue to discuss current topics as well as long-term goals to address hurdles to DER integration, such as anti-islanding, inverter fault current characterization, and verification of functional settings, among other things. The group works to stay abreast of research and standardization activities, identify gaps, and provide feedback to other working groups.
