Thank you to our panel and everyone who joined the Smart DERs – The Missing Link webinar! The panel discussed how smart DERs are necessary to sufficiently expand the grid’s hosting capacity for renewables. With the advent of smart inverters, standardized around California’s Rule 21, the technical capabilities exist to allow DERs to provide a holistic set of services to customers and utilities rather than a single value proposition of unmanaged energy generation. While smart inverters have a significant amount of useful features, they lack the intelligence to utilize these features – such as data observation on grid voltage, harmonics and frequency combined with data on real-time energy demand – to make the kinds of real-time decisions that would result in a more resilient and efficient grid system rather than one in which DERs are often viewed by utilities as a burden.
