Meet the Team Connecting Clean Energy to the Grid

The evolution of renewable energy requires feats of logistics and continuous learning. These engineers bring innovation and creativity to move the industry forward.

Author: Jen McGivney, Illumination Associate

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 26, 2024 / For over a hundred years, energy flowed in one direction; wires were lifted, electricity was turned off, customers were served. This is changing quickly. Today, many renewable energy sources – such as solar and batteries – feed energy back into the grid, creating multi-directional power flows.

Distributed energy is changing the work of energy companies. These flexible energy generation and storage technologies provide energy when customers need it most. They support the bidirectional power flow needed to expand cleaner energy options while enabling network improvements that increase reliability for customers.

“People working in the energy industry today have seen more change in the last few decades than the industry as a whole has seen in the last 150 years,” said Jason Handley, general manager of Duke Energy’s distributed energy group. “We are evolving as a utility and as a country because we have more renewable energy on our grid.”

However, before an energy company can fulfill its dream of renewable energy, it must overcome a logistical nightmare. If the wrong type of project is connected to the network, it can jeopardize the reliability of the entire network. This creates a difficult balance: How can a utility move at the speed of innovation while maintaining the pace of reliability?

Duke Energy wanted to answer this question in 2018 by creating a distributed generation (DG) team. The DG team, led by interconnection director Neil Bhagat, is developing strategies and processes to connect renewable energy projects to the grid.

“We built it from scratch,” Bhagat said. “It was exciting to have a startup environment supported by a company like Duke Energy, while also building a team that is passionate about the energy transition.”

Assembling a “sophisticated puzzle”

Interconnection is the complex process of connecting new sources of electrical energy – such as wind farms, solar farms and energy storage facilities – to the electricity grid.

To help maintain the security, reliability and power quality of the power system, all distributed power projects connected to the power grid must undergo a series of impact studies before they are built. This process determines what new transmission facilities or upgrades may be needed before the project can safely and reliably connect to the system.

When projects are waiting to be processed, they go into the so-called interconnection queue. Initially, several Duke Energy planning engineers handled these tasks as part of their regular jobs. But as North Carolina and dozens of other U.S. states began implementing distributed energy incentives, the number of projects in the pipeline increased dramatically.

That’s why the company has established an in-house team of innovative engineers – the DG team – to streamline the interconnection process and help connect more clean energy to the grid.

The development of renewable energy sources is critical as Duke Energy looks to retire its remaining coal-fired facilities while preparing to meet the extraordinary surge in electricity demand. To maintain reliability for customers, the company has proposed significant investments in cleaner generation, including thousands of megawatts of zero-emission solar power and many more energy storage batteries, devices that allow renewable energy to be stored and then released when demand for electricity is high.

“As a company pursues its clean energy transition, it is putting together a complex puzzle,” said Katherine Neebe, Duke Energy’s chief sustainability officer. “Every piece – generating and storing energy, modernizing the grid, supporting communities and collaborating with diverse stakeholders, multitasking workers and reducing carbon emissions – is essential. It is about finding the perfect fit for each element to create a final image that reveals a landscape of sustainable and connected solutions.”

Meeting the growing demand for renewable energy

Currently, the DG team consists of leaders in the field of distributed energy resources, as well as graduates with fresh ideas. All team members share two important features: comfort with uncertainty and creativity in solutions. They are constantly improving their skills to face challenges that did not exist a few years ago and which are changing as renewable technologies evolve.

“The kind of work we do is not, ‘Go in, open a book and do the same 10 or 12 steps every day. Repeat, repeat, repeat,” said Trent Miller, the team’s chief engineer. “This is where we come in to see what the challenge is today. What new can we learn today? We change from week to week.”

Duke Energy’s microgrid in Hot Springs, North Carolina, is one of the first major projects they explored. Consisting of a 4.4 megawatt (MW) battery storage facility and a 2 MW (AC) solar array, this advanced microgrid can power the entire city of Hot Springs during an outage, improving reliability for customers.

A new answer to an old problem

When the DG team was formed, its first challenge was daunting. Duke Energy, like other utilities across the country, had hundreds of renewable energy projects in the pipeline, all of which were awaiting a lengthy review process.

This encouraged Duke Energy to reform its interconnection process. As part of distributed generation, we moved from examining projects individually to examining them in “clusters”, which significantly reduced waiting times in the interconnection queue.

“That doesn’t mean they’ve all been fulfilled or that they’ve been connected to the network, but we’ve found a way to move them through the queue,” Bhagat said. “Projects may fall out of the interconnection process for several reasons – for example, retrofit costs may be much higher than expected.”

The team also found new ways to use modeling software to predict the impact of potential projects on the network. This has become an effective way to anticipate potential disruptions and make necessary adjustments to designs.

“It’s a much more reliable and repeatable process,” Handley said, “providing certainty not only to Duke Energy but also to our third-party customers who want to connect to the grid.”

“Future Use”

By implementing these new processes, the DG team aims to implement further advancements and new technologies that will help Duke Energy achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“Every day is a new day with different challenges. Now we are focusing on energy storage and microgrids,” said Kevin Chen, team manager. “The feeling that our team has helped the company and the industry get to a new place makes me proud of my team members.”

“We are becoming the utility of the future,” Miller added, “and we have been there to make it happen.”

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SOURCE: Duke energy

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