Damian Sciano, director of distribution planning and distributed resource integration for New York utility Consolidated Edison, has a complicated job: getting the 3.4-million-customer utility ready for a future that’s going to rely on clean electricity to meet almost all of its energy needs.
After a decade of investing in modernizing its largely underground, networked New York City grid and outlying overhead distribution system, Con Edison has built a strong foundation for integrating distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar, behind-the-meter batteries, electric vehicle chargers and fast-acting demand response into its grid operations.
It’s also been modernizing the IT systems to put its new grid infrastructure to work, with complex load flow modeling, outage restoration and grid restoration systems, demand response management platforms, and, after Hurricane Sandy, a big focus on resiliency, he said.
The 2015 launch of the New York Reforming the Energy Vision initiative, an ambitious statewide plan to incorporate distributed energy resources into day-to-day utility operations, boosted Con Edison’s DER ambitions. Under REV, Con Edison and the state’s other investor-owned utilities are tasked with creating a sprawling distribution system implementation plan outlining their range of efforts, as well as a distributed system platform to harness the value of customer-owned and operated DERs and reward them for their contributions.
New York REV has also driven Con Edison’s work on “non-wires solutions” to replace or postpone expensive grid investments with the capacity and flexibility of DERs. Its flagship effort, the Brooklyn Queens Demand Management project, is deferring a $1 billion distribution substation upgrade with roughly half that amount of money spent to install grid-scale batteries and procure demand response, energy efficiency and other customer-sited resources.
But last year’s passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act has brought added urgency to these efforts. “Nothing we did was directionally wrong — but [the legislation necessitated] a dramatic change in how we’re going to get there,” Sciano said. While New York REV set a goal of 50 percent renewables by 2030, CLCPA “not only [mandates] 100 percent renewables by 2040, but also the electrification…of vehicles…and heating systems” for its customers as natural gas is phased out.
Source: Greentech Media
