The proliferation of distributed energy resource (DER) adoption, particularly solar, across the U.S. in recent years has led to a common pattern of records being set for utilities, installers and more. Along those lines, last week marked an important achievement for Clean Power Research: the one hundred thousandth application was submitted for interconnection of a DER through PowerClerk® Interconnect. That means that roughly one in four interconnections in the past year were managed online in PowerClerk.
A year ago we issued a press release announcing that more than 25,000 applications had been received across five utility customers. Since then, a lot has happened (besides a 300% increase in project volume):
- Another 8 utility customers have come on board (including Tucson Electric and Orange and Rockland Utilities)
- 14 new programs have been publicly launched by new and existing customers (See Figure 1 below)
- Vast reductions in interconnection processing times have been achieved.
Specifically, in a recent webinar, Southern California Edison highlighted the process improvements they implemented along with PowerClerk to reduce application processing time to 3 days or less. In May 2016, 51% of Southern California Edison’s net energy metering applications were one-touch applications that usually receive permission to operate the same day that a complete application package is submitted.
In an Inside Edison article from August of this year, attention was also called to the quick rate at which Southern California Edison interconnects solar systems using their online system:
“Since last August, we have an online application system and it just takes a few days to get approval…”
Anthony Hernandez, P.E.
Senior Manager, Customer Distributed Resource Products at
Southern California Edison
Additionally, in May of this year, SEIA announced that the U.S. had surpassed one million installed solar systems. As a product family (PowerClerk Interconnect and PowerClerk Incentives), we’re celebrating 500,000 cumulative incentive and interconnection applications in PowerClerk over the past 10 years.
We estimate that detailed data for approximately 40% of all PV systems in the U.S. today is securely stored and readily accessible to utilities and energy agencies in a PowerClerk database. This data is used to power grid planning decision making, public reports, DER production forecasts and more. As an example of how this data is leveraged for DER modeling, see our SolarAnywhere® team’s daily solar production forecast for the California ISO which forecasts the production of 195,000 behind the meter PV systems every 30 minutes.
Stay tuned—it’s a pleasure to pass along updates as PowerClerk continues to cross new milestones, important new innovations take flight and customer success stories emerge. Speaking of customer success stories, don’t miss the upcoming webinar “How Tucson Electric Engineered the Pain out of Interconnection” that will highlight TEP’s path to increased customer satisfaction.