Eversource Energy Adopts New Smart Grid Software to Speed Up Interconnection Study

Wedoany.com Report-Nov 18, Eversource Energy, New England’s largest energy utility, is partnering with German smart software company envelio to accelerate and streamline its grid interconnection process.

Eversource is envelio’s first U.S. customer since expanding into the market with the formation of envelio Inc. in May. The company aims to enable grid operators and utilities to automate and accelerate grid interconnection to address the growing queue, previously offering its Intelligent Grid Platform (IGP) in Europe.

The IGP builds and manages a digital twin of the power grid with a network model management engine called Grid Hub. On this basis, the IGP provides a suite of integrated applications for interconnection, grid planning, and operation.

Utilizing envelio’s platform, Eversource will construct a new customer interface that consolidates all interconnection information, including advanced hosting capacity. Building on the IGP’s Grid Hub, the interconnection study processes and analysis will be evolved through automation to handle the increasing volume of new applications.

In Germany, envelio has used the IGP to automate the process of more than 55,000 interconnection studies in the last 12 months, which it claims saved more than 50,000 hours of work for engineers and technical planners. In addition, the IGP provides applications for data-driven decisions in other grid planning and operation processes.

The backlog of new power generation and energy storage seeking transmission connections across the U.S. grew again in 2023, with nearly 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity actively seeking grid interconnection by 2024, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Active capacity in U.S. interconnection queues increased nearly eight-fold over the last decade and is now more than twice the total installed capacity of the existing U.S. power plant fleet. The queues indicate particularly strong interest in solar, battery storage, and wind energy, which together accounted for over 95% of all active capacity at the end of 2023. Some grid operators, like PJM Interconnection, have even had to pause their queues to reassess the way they approach interconnection requests.

In a “first-of-its-kind” scorecard from national business association Advanced Energy United that evaluated and grades the seven U.S. regional transmission organizations on their generator interconnection processes, ISO-NE received a “D+” grade, which actually was the third-highest out of the seven, following behind CAISO and ERCOT.