From The Energy Collective – 5 Key Proposals for New York’s Grid Transformation

The Energy Collective breaks down New York’s plan to ramp-up the state’s electric grid and energy markets.

The Energy Collective
Contact: Jeff St. John

New York’s Public Service Commission has provided some of the first details of how it plans to transform the state’s electric grid and energy markets, with proposals to turn the state’s utilities into distributed system platform providers, identify use cases for replacing grid upgrades with distributed generation, and create open markets for third-party competition.

Those are some of the highlights of the straw proposal (PDF) for New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative, released late last month. The 81-page report is the first big step in a processlaunched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in April to create distribution grid planning, utility ratemaking and competitive energy markets that brings distributed energy resources to the forefront.

The REV process calls for turning the state’s utilities into “distribution system platform providers” (DSPPs), able to track, trade and forecast assets like rooftop solar PV, customer-sited cogeneration and CHP systems, demand response and energy efficiency, behind-the-meter energy storage, and other grid edge systems — many of them outside utility control.

Much like California, New York is tackling both the way the distribution grid is operated from day to day and how investments in it will be allocated for decades to come. (I will be leading a discussion with Tony Brunello, executive director of the Greentech Leadership Group, and Patty Durand, executive director of the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative, about the grid and consumer implications of these kinds of broad policy and economic restructurings at tomorrow’s Soft Grid 2014 conference in Menlo Park, California.)

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