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Publications / SAND Report

Alternatives to the 15% Rule

Broderick, Robert J.; Rylander, Matthew R.; Reno, Matthew J.; Munoz-Ramos, Karina M.; Quiroz, Jimmy E.; Smith, Jeff S.; Rogers, Lindsey R.; Dugan, Roger D.; Mather, Barry M.; Coddington, Michael C.; Gotseff, Peter G.; Ding, Fei D.

The third solicitation of the California Solar Initiative (CSI) Research, Development, Demonstration and Deployment (RD&D) Program established by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) is supporting the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) with collaboration from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), in research to improve the Utility Application Review and Approval process for interconnecting distributed energy resources to the distribution system. Currently this process is the most time - consuming of any step on the path to generating power on the distribution system. This CSI RD&D solicitation three project has completed the tasks of collecting data from the three utilities, clustering feeder characteristic data to attain representative feeders, detailed modeling of 16 representative feeders, analysis of PV impacts to those feeders, refinement of current screening processes, and validation of those suggested refinements. In this report each task is summarized to produce a final summary of all components of the overall project.