Meeting Load Growth
Lisa Schwartz is a senior Energy Researcher and Strategic Advisor for Berkeley Lab's Energy Markets and Planning Department. Brian Lydic is Chief Regulatory Engineer at IREC, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
With the federal tax credit for residential solar, wind, geothermal, and battery technologies expiring at the end of the year, and another credit for commercial applications of certain generation technologies expiring as soon as 2027, states across the country are working to mitigate barriers to the timely interconnection of projects to utility grids. At the same time, many states continue to work toward driving down costs associated with interconnection processes.
In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Interconnection Innovation Exchange (i2X) released a Distributed Energy Resources Interconnection Roadmap. The Roadmap sets near-term targets for distributed energy resource (DER) projects interconnecting to utility distribution systems and offers strategies for achieving these goals.
The 2025 NARUC annual meeting featured a session on “Managing Interconnection Complexity: Proven State Strategies to Accelerate DER Adoption,” to share solutions from across the U.S. to accelerate DER deployment while maintaining reliability and affordability.