Technology Isn’t Causing the DER Industry’s Data Woes. It’s People.

States are trying but is it enough?

Building distributed energy projects requires access to utility data that too often arrives in a format that’s difficult to decipher, search or manipulate. (See Death by a Million PDFs.)

It’s hard to identify the exact cause of the problem.?Some say utilities lack the incentive to help distributed energy companies that they view as competitors; others point to the fact that utilities are experts in energy, not information technology, so they don’t necessarily know how to make customer data accessible.

So finding a universal solution hasn’t been easy. The good news is that some states are making headway.

It’s got to be click, click, click

A big step occurred in April when the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) finished the first phase of its Integrated Energy Data Resource (IEDR) project.?

The E Source-driven initiative is designed to remove the problem DER providers face of going utility by utility to gather data. Instead, it creates a centralized repository with searchable information about electrical systems, distributed energy devices, rate plans, and customers. Beta users are now vetting a prototype.

By aggregating and standardizing data, NYSERDA hopes to increase renewable energy in the state, especially in disadvantaged communities. For DER developers, the platform should make siting and permitting projects faster and less expensive, according to E Source, a Boulder-based utility-focused consulting, research, and data science company.?Locating ideal project sites could occur in just “a few keystrokes, compared to legacy manual approaches involving phone calls, emails, and thousands of pages of nonsearchable PDF content.”

Because of IEDR, New York is now rapidly surpassing California as the most friendly state when it comes to energy data, according to Michael Murray, president of Mission:data, a national coalition of technology companies that advocate for customer-friendly energy data access policies. (He also points to Texas as high on the list.)

New York’s program is novel, Murray said, in that it encompasses data from both electric and gas utilities, and it creates a central data hub rather than leaving the job to each investor-owned utility, as California does.

He said that the new platform will prove especially valuable as New York accesses $158 million from Home Energy Rebates, an?$8.8 billion grant program offered through the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This is because the ‘Home’ program is different from many rebate offerings in that it is based on performance. The rebates are granted for proven energy savings, not for buying or installing a particular appliance.

It would be a nightmare, he said, to track this kind of incentive using customer bills formatted as PDFs.

?“It’s got to be click, click, click. So this is the solution,” he said. “The money that they’ve spent on the IEDR is going to more than pay for itself, just in administrative efficiency.”

New England taking it a step further

Elsewhere in the Northeast, an even more ambitious data access initiative is underway...

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