Let's review factors influencing the development of distributed generation, with an emphasis on the need for financeable and deployable contracts on which DG can be financed, constructed and operated.
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Author Bio:
Nicholas Giannasca is a partner in the Energy and Environmental Practice Group of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. In his 28 years of practicing, he has represented developers and hosts of commercial distributed generation facilities.
What are the most exciting things happening at PPL? What were the biggest challenges in that journey? Were there some tough challenges you had to get through?
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Bill Spence joined PPL in 2006 as executive vice president and chief operating officer. He was named president and CEO in 2011, and chairman in 2012. Previously, he served nineteen years with Pepco Holdings in senior management positions.
Historically, grid operators tapped into voluntary load reduction as a last resort for keeping the lights on. But now, smart grid technologies and dynamic pricing mechanisms bring vastly greater potential for using load as a dispatchable resource. Effective implementation requires advanced technologies—and also foresight in creating programs, policies, and market mechanisms.
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Audrey Zibelman is co-founder and CEO of Viridity Energy, and formerly was chief operating officer at PJM. Chika Nwankpa is a professor and Director of the Center for Electric Power Engineering (CEPE) at Drexel University. Alain Steven is co-founder and executive vice president of strategy at Viridity Energy, and formerly was chief technology officer at PJM. Allen Freifeld is senior vice president of law and public policy at Viridity Energy, and formerly was a commissioner on the Maryland Public Service Commission.
The long-predicted future of distributed generation is now becoming a reality. Customers increasingly are installing and operating behind-the-meter generation systems, creating challenges and opportunities for utilities. ConEdison’s experience demonstrates the dangers and challenges, as well as the opportunities for becoming partners with utility customers.
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Sidebar Title:
How Con Edison Includes DG in the Forecast
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When considering alternatives to costly infrastructure investments, the solutions are compared to the marginal cost of utility projects avoided. Traditional utility infrastructure investments to increase the marginal capacity of a distribution network can cost as little as $100/kW for substation cooling and as much as $2,000/kW for a new station build. The typical cost for DSM measures is approximately $1,000/kW.
Factors evaluated to determine use of existing DG as a reliable load reduction are:
• Area substation contingency design criteria;
• Information from specific DG units;
• Baseloaded output (kW) of each DG unit;
• Historical weekday outage rate and daily 24-hour output of each DG unit during the summer period—June, July and August; and
• Telemetry such as DG breaker status, kW and kVAR, to monitor DG performance including time of peak output coincident with the substation peak loads.
For customers with more than one generator, electrical one-line diagrams are examined to consider common-mode failures.–MJ, DL, and CR
Author Bio:
Margarett Jolly (jollym@coned.com) is Con Edison’s distributed generation ombudsperson. David Logsdon (logsdond@coned.com) is a distributed generation specialist and Christopher Raup (raupc@coned.com) is manager of state regulatory affairs at Con Edison. The authors acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues Frank Cuomo, Jairo Gomez, Michael Harrington, Martin Heslin, Ahmed Mousa, and Robert Schimmenti.
