Product Abstract

This report provides a description of the Con Edison Smart Grid Demonstration Host-Site Project as part of the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI's) five-year smart grid demonstration initiative. The EPRI initiative includes core smart grid research and a number of large-scale smart grid projects with 19 funding utility members. The project is focused on integrating large-scale distributed energy resources (DER), including demand response, storage, distributed generation, and distributed renewable generation, into a "virtual power plant" to advance widespread, efficient, and cost-effective deployment of utility and customer side technologies in the distribution and overall power system operations. Host-Site projects apply EPRI's IntelliGrid^sm methodology to define requirements for the technologies and communication, information, and control infrastructures that support integration of DER.

Objective

Information in this report will help electric industry stakeholders understand emerging technologies and business cases for deploying smart grid technologies focused on integration of DER. Integration and interoperability challenges associated with integrating multiple types of resources at multiple levels within grid systems will be addressed throughout this project.

Approach

This report documents the smart grid project goals and how they align with EPRI's smart grid demonstration initiative. The content in this report was evaluated by EPRI's IntelliGrid technical review team along with an industry stakeholder peer review team prior to being presented to the EPRI Board of Directors as an EPRI smart grid demonstration host-site project.

Results

This report outlines the initial goals of the smart grid project, how the goals align with EPRI's six critical elements, and how this project will support the industry in advancing widespread integration of distributed energy resources. The initial project description will serve as a baseline that will be tracked throughout the five-year initiative and measured at the end of the project. Operations experience, integration issues, and lessons learned will reveal the full range of standards and interoperability requirements for these technologies to support the industry. Gaps revealed will identify critical areas of future smart grid research. Public updates will be made available on www.smartgrid.epri.com. The main objective of the demonstrations is to identify approaches for interoperability and integration that can be used on a system-wide scale to help standardize the use of demand-side resources as part of overall system operations and control.

Application, Value and Use

This report provides a plan used by one utility to address the challenges associated with integrating DER; this plan supports one of EPRI's goals—to have a diverse set of approaches and architectures to achieve integration of DER. Over the duration of this five-year project, associated research such as architecture design, lessons learned, cost benefit analysis, and customer behavior will be evaluated and described to members of the smart grid demonstration initiative—and, as appropriate, to the public—to help advance the industry in the deployment and benefits of the integration of distributed energy resources.

EPRI Perspective

Smart grid projects are occurring nationally and internationally with common goals. EPRI provides the collaboration expertise with the industry, bringing significant value to members in avoiding duplication of work and broadly sharing lessons learned with the industry.