Dive Brief:
- Amid a flurry of orders yesterday, New York regulators gave guidance to investor-owned utilities to help evolve their electric grids into platforms allowing third-party service providers access to power customers.
- By Oct. 1, the state's five major utilities must file a hosting capacity analysis for all circuits at and above 12kV.
- The order, which is heavy on procedure and schedule-setting, is nonetheless an important milestone in the state's efforts to revamp its utility industry and turn utilities into service providers on the grid.
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Dive Insight:
On any other day, an order from New York's PSC on how utilities might integrate distributed resources would big news. But yesterday the commission issued a landmark decision on the value of distributed generation — alongside directives to install energy storage — and so a DSIP schedule suddenly seems less immediate.
But the devil is in the details, and the commission offered guidance on hosting capacity, interconnection portals, non-wires alternatives and data privacy.
Specifically, the commission determined that by Oct. 1 the major utilities must complete a hosting capacity analysis, and submit a report documenting that the first phase the interconnection portals initiative has been fully implemented. And within 60 days, utilities must lay out how the suitability criteria will be incorporated into utility planning procedures.
In June of last year, the state's utilities took the next step in the state's Reforming the Energy Vision docket, filing broad outlines for how they will modernize their grids and evolve their business practices to encourage distributed energy resources. The state is deep into a process of rethinking how it delivers energy and how to make those systems more efficient, clean and affordable.
The commission yesterday approved a new compensation structure for distributed energy resources, and also directed utilities to develop at least two energy storage systems by the end of 2018.