Under the new system, DER projects that want to interconnect to California’s grid will go through a review process that uses the “integration capacity analysis” – essentially, a model of grid conditions that provides a picture of the hosting capacity of the electric system, or the amount of power output it can handle without requiring infrastructure upgrades.
California is the first state to adopt such a system, which could offer potential to others as well. “Other states will be watching what happens and how successful this is, and we hope certainly that other states will move towards this process,” Sky Stanfield, partner with Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, said.