Workshop Identifies Key Enablers to Interconnection
Elizabeth Cook is Vice President for Technical Strategy at the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies.
Earlier this year, AEIC established a separate 501c3 organization called the AEIC Center for Operational Excellence. The mission of AEIC's Ops Center, as we call it, is to provide the electric utility industry with authoritative information as a basis for decision making on local, state, and federal infrastructure investments.
The Ops Center will facilitate projects that address important issues in our industry, including technology challenges, grid storage, electrification, and more. As projects are completed, the Ops Center will publish results so that all industry stakeholders can have access to trusted, actionable information at their fingertips.
In addition, the Ops Center will organize Critical Action Forums to drive open discussion and collaboration between utilities and the broader industry to identify and share concerns, lessons learned, gaps and challenges, improvement opportunities, and solutions. In June, the Ops Center held an Integrated Distribution System Planning (IDSP) workshop in Atlanta, Georgia as part of this Critical Action Forum series.
The IDSP workshop brought together leaders from eighteen electric utilities, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to share insights and best practices focused on interconnections and load forecasting.