How the Future of DER Interconnection Could Mirror the Evolution of Booking a Flight

The interconnection process can make or break a project. And yet, it’s difficult to tell exactly how bad the bottlenecks truly are. Distribution-level interconnection data is fragmented across more than 3,000 utilities regulated by 50 different states, with few central places that collect data and none that have the full picture on backlogs or outcomes. The process is often opaque, slow, and inconsistent, and that’s exactly why fixing it matters so much for the clean energy transition.

Dexter Hendricks, Senior Manager of Interconnection Policy at the Coalition for Community Solar Access, sat down with HeatSpring instructor Vaughan Woodruff as part of the “How We Got Here: A (Riveting!) History of DER Interconnection in the U.S.” course, and his analogy for what interconnection could look like in the future really stuck with us: booking a flight. If you’re too young to remember travel agents, trust us – it was a whole thing. What once required an expert intermediary and a lot of guesswork is now a two-second Google search. He sees no reason interconnection can’t get there too. Tune into the video below to hear his vision of interconnection of the future. 

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Transcript below.

More utilities are being asked to look ahead at where DER adoption is likely to occur and plan distribution investments proactively, rather than waiting for individual interconnection requests to trigger upgrades. The idea is to make those investments in a more intentional way — using a mix of traditional utility planning and cost allocation approaches — so interconnection becomes more predictable and less reactive over time.

That’s really the vision for 2030, where interconnection is boring. It’s much more akin to booking a flight to Denmark tomorrow. I think the airline industry is a really good analogy. I’m 34, but I’ve been told that back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, you had to have a travel agent. If you wanted to go to Europe for a vacation, a travel agent cost money, and it was complicated for them to figure out what made the most sense to get you where you wanted to go.

But now, in two seconds, I can go on Google, type in that I want to go to Denmark, and it’ll automatically show me all the options I have. I make a decision based on my budget and how I want to get there, and I choose my path forward.

The ideal world for interconnection is that kind of process — where everyone has all the data in front of them, they understand what decisions they need to make and what tradeoffs are involved, and they can move toward an optimal outcome.

We’re seeing some really amazing innovations in the software space. Companies are developing near real-time telemetry and hosting capacity maps that let people see exactly where there’s capacity on the grid and make decisions based on that. There are other factors that go into siting a project in a particular place on the grid, but that data transparency is a big part of it.

We live in the golden age of technology. AI is right around the corner as something that’s easily applicable in our space, and I think this is the best time to start looking at what those technology solutions can do to help us optimize the grid we already have.