Environmental Defense Fund
Casey Horan is an attorney at Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in the legal and policy aspects of EV-readiness and utility regulation. In her role, she works to support medium- and heavy-duty charging infrastructure, grid modernization and climate resilience. She also collaborates with stakeholders and decision makers to maximize opportunities for EV deployment and speed progress toward state climate and decarbonization goals.
The new era of electric load growth is here, with electric vehicles, electrified buildings, and data centers all expected to drive additional electricity consumption in the coming years. While data centers may be the headline challenge today, at the distribution level, vehicles and buildings are driving many grid upgrade needs.
To ensure these new large loads get connected to the distribution grid quickly and without driving up costs for customers, some utilities are beginning to design and implement flexible interconnection programs that provide partial service to customers as a temporary or long-term solution where the grid cannot handle full interconnection today.
These programs can come in many different shapes and sizes, and utilities implementing them must consider the tradeoffs involved in their design. This is the focus of a new white paper from Environmental Defense Fund exploring policy solutions for utilities designing flexible interconnection programs.
The term flexible interconnection refers to a range of methodologies for optimizing use of existing grid infrastructure when connecting customers to the grid by managing customers’ peak load. Flexible interconnections can be achieved through:
Hardware, where physical infrastructure is put in place to limit a customer’s maximum demand; and/or