Announcing the Pearl Street Knowledge Center

A newsletter about transmission planning, interconnection, renewable energy, and more.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Pearl Street Knowledge Center. Every couple of weeks, we post a new article on a topic of interest to ISO/utility professionals, energy developers, and others in the electric power systems planning and analysis space, with emphasis on our current area of focus: generator interconnection. Broadly, our objective for this content is to generate discussion, explain contemporary issues pertaining to interconnection and system planning, and to share our views on the current state of the industry. Pearl Street’s engineers utilize many of these materials for internal technical reference and training, and in sharing this content we hope you find it useful and informative.

Why are we doing this?

It is well-established that the electric power industry is experiencing a paradigm shift, extending to the complex fabric of technologies, tools, and policies that influence how the future grid manifests. Arguably the most dominant driver of this shift is the attempt to deploy large amounts of grid-scale clean electrical energy. We’re using “attempt” here, because despite the ability of these technologies to cheaply produce power and address climate targets, substantial technical and financial barriers still exist in bringing them on-line.

We’d like the Pearl Street Knowledge Center to provide a space for identifying, discussing, and (hopefully) addressing barriers that exist in interconnection. From software applications to process reform and more, the web of factors impacting projects from an interconnection lens is extensive and not always well-documented. Our goal is to unravel the complexity behind interconnection, with a particular emphasis on interconnection

study processes and associated modeling in the United States, and how they can impact project timelines and costs. In doing so, we hope to create broader understanding and transparency for those involved in interconnection-related project work, while proposing solutions that could eliminate bottlenecks, reduce study timelines, save cost, and accelerate the clean energy transition.

What topics will we cover?

Interconnection analysis is a primary component of Pearl Street’s mission to enable a cleaner, more reliable power grid, and that’s where we’ll focus our initial articles. In these articles we’ll explore interconnection broadly, including various analysis types and their purposes (e.g., project siting and cost estimation). We’ll also discuss more nuanced topics like the impacts of generation dispatch on interconnection model quality and simulation results. Interconnection is a fast-changing and complex area, and to make sense of any single such aspect can be daunting. Our hope is that the topics we’ll discuss will offer a coherent and distilled perspective on complicated subjects from where Pearl Street sits in the industry.

Contact

Any feedback? Want to extend the conversation? Reach out to us at hello@pearlstreettechnologies.com, and we’ll get back to you. Thanks for reading and subscribing.