Funding Opportunity: Technology to Market 2
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: Summit, NJ
SunShot Award Amount: $700,000
Awardee Cost Share: $700,000

GridUnity, formerly Qado Energy, is enabling large utilities to conduct rapid forecasting and planning of distributed energy resource (DER) deployment combinations through the use of hybrid distribution/transmission models. The rapid addition of distributed generation creates concerns among utilities and regional transmission operators about impacts on transmission. The development of transmission impact functionality will drive down interconnection times of large commercial and small utility projects, which are known for their lengthy queues.

Approach

The project team will create a commercial system planning offering that guides a user through the process of setting up and running forecasting options that use newly-developed hybrid models and consider both transmission and distribution detail. This configurable process will provide utilities with a unified approach to interconnection planning and system assessment that can be performed frequently in order to stay ahead of the growing levels of DER on the grid.

Innovative

This project will enable short-cycle, iterative planning designed for a constantly evolving grid environment, unlike current one- or two-year planning processes that use software that was designed for relatively static distribution systems and requires less efficient manual effort. Incorporating utility asset strategy and planning will drastically reduce the time required for engineering studies and will enable computationally-intensive simulations that weren’t previously practical.