Sky Stanfield, attorney for IREC, laid out six foundational regulatory policies for deploying large amounts of renewable energy on the grid at Renewable Energy World North America and PowerGenWeek recently.

It is widely recognized that distributed energy storage can offer a host of benefits to utilities, storage customers and ratepayers. It is particularly true that energy storage has enormous potential to ease the integration of high levels of renewable energy onto the electric grid. However, as it stands today, the regulatory and market policies in the electricity sector are not yet positioned to enable energy storage developers and customers to deploy the technology in a manner that ensures access to the full range of benefits it can offer.

Along with the season's time-honored traditions, comes time to pause and reflect on the past year and year to come. Here's a closer look at what we can expect to play out in the national regulatory arena next year. It's definitely shaping up to be an energetic year.

Recently, IREC, along with the Vote Solar Initiative, released our annual Freeing the Grid report card for state net energy metering (NEM) and interconnection policies. After seven years of grading state net metering and interconnection policies, we have a bit of perspective on how they have changed over time. One thing is for sure: we are looking at a vastly different policy landscape than when we started grading them back in 2007.

A new report from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) offers lessons learned from 16 regional and utility-specific DSG studies summarized in a recent review by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and then proposes a standardized valuation methodology for public utility commissions to consider implementing in future studies.