Abstract
Globally, interconnecting a new solar or wind generation project to the grid involves navigating a queue requiring financial deposits, engineering studies, and fees to upgrade the electric grid. The process can take years, during which time changes to regulatory regimes, tax incentives, financial markets, or competitive pressures can make a project suddenly nonviable for an investor. For grid operators, the increasing saturation of intermittent generation concurrent with retiring fossil fuel generation makes every new project increasingly complex to assess. This paper provides a case study of applying process mining techniques to address the question of whether the options proposed by Duke Energy Carolinas (DEC) to reform its generation interconnection queue process are warranted. Two options for reform have been proposed: creating study clusters based on concurrency or creating them based on locational proximity. Results indicate support for aspects of both options, although some causes may prove uncontrollable due to their origin in external factors such as market competition and power systems engineering decision making.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Duke Energy website. https://www.duke-energy.com/our-company/about-us. Accessed 27 July 2020
US Energy Information Agency website. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NC. Accessed 27 July 2020
Solar Energy International website. https://seia.org/state-solar-policy/north-carolina-solar. Accessed 27 July 2020
Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43453/17. Accessed 27 July 2020
NCUC website. https://starw1.ncuc.net/NCUC/PSC/PSCDocumentDetailsPageNCUC.aspx?DocumentId=6d82de14-71de-492f-a6d4-f9a14099642a&Class=Order. Accessed 27 July 2020
NCUC website. DEC and DEP Queue Reform Update, 15 October 2019. https://starw1.ncuc.net/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ca6866e-dcaf-4622-b543-486ab37cc34a. Accessed 27 July 2020
NCUC website, Document Search. https://starw1.ncuc.net/NCUC/page/DocumentsTextSearch/portal.aspx. Search term: “Interconnection Queue”. Accessed 27 July 2020
Sanchez-Gonzalez, L., et al.: Towards Thresholds of Control Flow Complexity Measures for BPMN Models (2011). https://jorge-cardoso.github.io/publications/Papers/CP-2011-060-SAC-Towards-thresholds-of-control-flow.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2020
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Murphy, G. (2021). Process “Prospecting” to Improve Renewable Energy Interconnection Queues: A Case Study. In: Leemans, S., Leopold, H. (eds) Process Mining Workshops. ICPM 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 406. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72693-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72693-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72692-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72693-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)