March 23, 2023

What’s Next in Energy Storage Interconnection? Emerging Issues and Challenges Webinar

This workshop highlights several barriers to energy storage interconnection, identified by the BATRIES team, that remain to be addressed and require future work.

As standalone energy storage and solar-plus-storage deployment increases across the U.S., new solutions are emerging to speed up the process and reduce the costs of interconnecting storage to the distribution grid. These solutions include improving the interconnection review process for storage to enable controlled imports and exports; updated technical standards to support smart inverters; and new approaches to enabling storage scheduling and flexibility.

At the same time, a number of other challenges require further evaluation. The Building a Technically Reliable Interconnection Evolution for Storage (“BATRIES”) project identified nearly forty storage interconnection challenges, eight of which are addressed with detailed solutions in the BATRIES Toolkit. In this workshop, the BATRIES project team will highlight several of the storage interconnection barriers that remain to be addressed. They represent near-term issues that stakeholders including regulators, utilities, national labs, and the DER community should work to address through research and solutions development.

Participants in the workshop will learn how the following challenges arise in the energy storage interconnection process and what existing knowledge and practice gaps have to be addressed:

  • Enabling storage system imports from the distribution grid; 
  • Addressing the risks of storage systems causing flicker or rapid voltage changes;
  • Addressing the impacts of storage system power transitions;
  • Developing solutions for storage interconnection that are applicable in networked distribution systems; 
  • Applying storage interconnection solutions to “vehicle-to-everything” interconnection.