Distributed Energy Resource Journey at North Carolina Electric Cooperatives

North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives has embarked upon an extensive initiative to leverage DERs for enhanced grid reliability, resilience, and economics; including five sites structured as microgrids. The proliferation of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) can pose challenges for reliable grid operation due to their voltage impacts, reverse power flows, and local phase imbalances, to name a few.  However, if leveraged properly, by proper design and implementation of DER aggregations, they can offer improved grid reliability, resilience, and economics.  This presentation will demonstrate how this is achieved by North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives. Aggregation of DERs can be formed with a view to their technical and grid connectivity characteristics and operated collectively following a combination of control signals and temporal and geographical value signals. Several examples of field implementation will be covered including special cases where the DERs are spread through the distribution grid and cases where they are located within microgrid footprints with one or more points of common coupling with the distribution grid.

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