A comparison of NYS utilities' approaches to integrate distributed energy resources and the penetration over time

The Reforming the Energy Vision, is an ambitious project initiated by NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2015 to, in part, integrate Distributed Energy Resources, in an effort to transform New York State's electric transmission and distribution system for the 21^st Century. One aspect of the program has placed the integration of Solar & Wind power generation projects on to the Operating Companies Networks into high gear. Even with NYS statutes on how the Utilities are to accept all qualified electric generators into their systems, there still remains some discretion in how the individual Utilities may accomplish this effort. Consequently, each Operating Company may have a set of rules and regulations as to how the connection shall be made. This leads to more questions than answers. To gain knowledge about different aspects of the project we started to learn more detail about the project and various potential approaches to get to the goal. We are also studying variations in the imperative system parameters before and after distributed integration. In this presentation we will present our initial study on some approaches and critical parameters that we think are important for the system design based upon the regulations from the NYS Department of Public Service. Discussion will also include technologies, design approaches and challenges to determine the practicality and feasibility of distributed integration in a power system from an economic as well as operational point of view.