Priority Initiatives

The long-term goal of modernizing New York’s electrical grid to improve reliability and resiliency, lower long-term costs, and meet the evolving energy service needs of consumers, will only be achieved through a collaboration of many different stakeholders who are each responsible for different parts of the solution.

To facilitate this collaboration and accelerate adoption of new smart grid technologies, the Consortium is currently focused on the following priority initiatives during 2017.

1. Support Development of DSO/DSP Simulation Studio Project

The Consortium is part of a team that received a $3 million total award from ARPA-E to develop a Distribution System Operator (DSO) simulation model – a specialized, interactive software tool capable of simulating the operation of emerging DSOs and distributed system platforms (DSPs) at the physical, information, and market levels.

The software extends state-of-the art distribution grid solvers with detailed distributed energy resource (DER) models, decentralized optimization, DSO pricing rules, and interactive analytics features. The role of the Consortium on the project is to:

  • Establish and facilitate working group of New York stakeholders
  • Identify existing distribution grid modeling tools, approaches, capabilities, and/or DSP objectives under REV
  • Provide New York stakeholder input regarding simulator needs, features, and capabilities
  • Coordinate model development with other national entities
  • Coordinate simulator beta testing using New York case studies

Learn more about the project here.

2. Support Research Regarding Advanced Metering and Customer Engagement

As advanced metering begins to be deployed within New York State, the Consortium will undertake several research projects to provide objective information to the public, customers, and regulators regarding various issues related to advanced metering. Specifically, the Consortium will focus on the following:

  • Conduct a survey of New York consumers’ attitudes and behaviors regarding evolving energy services, technologies and policies
  • Identify independent and objective research demonstrating benefits and potential consumer impacts of advanced metering
  • Identify best practices regarding program offerings and content available to consumers once metering is in place

3. Facilitate Research to Address Utilities’ Long-term Critical Needs and Challenges

The Consortium has been working with New York utilities to identify their most difficult, long-term technical challenges. The Consortium will inventory grid related research currently underway, identify gaps, and facilitate targeted workshops to match resources with needs. The technical challenges relate to:

  • Data/model-driven nature of the industry
  • Integrating new technologies into the system
  • Communications infrastructure
  • Distributed Energy Resource (DER) optimization

The first workshop will be conducted in cooperation with Brookhaven National Laboratory, and is anticipated to focus on research needs related to DSP planning and implementation tools, especially those needed for distributed energy resources (DER) interconnection and DER valuation at the distribution layer.