Landis+Gyr is pleased to congratulate our utility partner, Arizona Public Service (APS), for being recognized as Utility Project of the Year for Renewable Integration by Powergrid International last week at DistribuTECH 2017 for their first-in the country efforts to better manage distributed energy resources (DERs) on the grid.

As part of their Solar Partners Program (SPP), APS is leveraging Landis+Gyr’s AMI network to communicate with and control approximately 1,600 utility-owned, operated and maintained residential rooftop PV systems with advanced inverters. The ability to send commands and monitor the output of the inverters has allowed APS to leverage large numbers of small photovoltaic systems (a combined 10 MW of total installed capacity) as an asset for grid operators.

Additionally, the SPP is testing a number of new use cases, including: equipment deferment, voltage management, stress due to high solar penetration, interoperability, communication, energy storage, and system model validation.

Speaking to Transmission and Distribution World, APS Director of Technology Innovation, Scott Bordenkircher commented, “APS is taking an industry lead with this program –and others like it—that will ultimately provide data essential to helping utilities achieve a more reliable and sustainable grid, while providing for greater customer technology choice.”

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has released detailed findings of the SPP project so far, and future work will shift focus from PV inverters to energy storage deployments, and look to integrate new technologies such as integrated Volt-VAR control (IVVC) of capacitor banks and regulators.

In addition to APS, the Solar Partner Project has involved extensive collaboration and integration of Landis+Gyr communication and distribution automation technologies with those of program partners Siemens, SolarEdge, and SME-America.

More information about Landis+Gyr’s communications platform can be found here, and we invite you to learn more about APS’s solar Partners Program here.