Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Enabling Residential DER at Scale: Hydro One’s Approach to Hosting Capacity Transparency, Smart Inverters, and DER Planning
Hydro One

As residential solar and battery adoption accelerates, distribution utilities are under growing pressure to connect more inverter-based DERs without compromising voltage performance, reliability, or customer transparency. Hydro One has implemented several practical innovations to support residential distributed energy resources (DER), including rooftop solar, battery energy storage systems (BESS), and hybrid solar-plus-storage applications. These innovations include a public DER hosting capacity map & DER Capacity Calculator that provides high-level feeder and station hosting information for projects ranging from residential micro-DER to larger inverter-based resources, with screening by DER type and export behaviour and regular updates to improve visibility for customers and developers. Hydro One has also implemented smart inverter settings for certain constrained micro-embedded DER applications and modified its station and feeder capacity screening so that some projects that would previously have been screened out may now proceed on a conditional basis, subject to additional technical requirements. This paper presents a utility case study of Hydro One’s evolving residential DER enablement framework and examines how transparency tools, smart inverter functionality, and improved planning practices can work together to expand hosting capacity while reducing uncertainty in residential interconnection. 

How do we get more power, in the right spots, now?
Storion Energy

Data Centers have begun to break down all the historic rules for why we use storage. Our focus of energy efficiency, cost effectiveness, and asset durability must all change to optimize for the new application where FLOPS per Watt matter far more than dollars per watt. How can we optimize for maximizing throughput? How can we deploy these datacenters without significant blowback from the grid that impacts the local communities? Reliability, Durability and Duration are key to balancing these often-competing targets. This session explores how LDES and battery durability can change the equation by playing together in allowing a datacenter to grow larger than its interconnect, can create best in class reliability, and can benefit the surrounding communities.