“Given our climate crisis, state utility commissions must act with urgency and prioritize innovation in the way utilities are regulated,” says the Sunrun policy team in a paper. Noting great progress by Hawaii and Vermont, they also call for state regulators to “rethink” how utilities make money.

“It’s time for ISO-New England to get out of the way” of renewables, said Senator Markey. He and Senators Warren and Sanders have asked federal energy regulators to end an anti-renewables rule in New England formally known as the “minimum offer price rule.”

NREL’s final report on the future of storage, drawing from a series of six in-depth studies, presents “key learnings” from across those studies.

To speed interconnection of utility-scale solar and storage, “maybe we want somebody running the show that has more of an interest in getting all these resources in the grid,” said law professor Shelley Welton in a webinar for “100% clean energy states.”

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, lead developer of a toolkit to make it faster and less costly to interconnect distributed storage, now turns to helping states use the toolkit to update their interconnection rules.

Commissioner Phillips spoke of fixing interconnection dynamics that can result in only 20% of projects in a queue ultimately getting interconnected. He favors “substantial transmission,” he said, as well as near-term transmission improvements using grid-enhancing technologies and higher-capacity wires.

Transparent utility modeling in two other states has enabled advocates to show that adding more solar than utilities had proposed in their resource plans would yield benefits. The Arizona Technology Council and sustainability advocate Ceres brought the idea to Arizona regulators.

10GW/year of solar and 5GW/year of storage would be needed under that aggressive scenario, according to an analysis for the California Air Resources Board.

The story of how the three-year battle was fought and won, at least for now, was shared with members of Puerto Rico’s solar trade group.

Interconnection is widely seen as a bottleneck slowing solar deployment. Even so, three regional grid operators processed 25GW of utility-scale solar interconnection requests last year, an amount exceeding utility-scale solar installations in the entire US during the year.