DERConnect – A Distributed Energy Resources Testbed for Solar Power Integration

Distributed Energy Resources Connect (DERConnect) is a National Science Foundation user facility to facilitate testing of distributed communication and controls algorithms at scale. DERConnect caters to industry and academic users in the electric power sector. DERConnect will provide testing capabilities of 1,000s of real DERs and millions of simulated DERs. DERConnect is designed to test intelligence on the grid edge by configuring the DERs in any communication architecture such as peer-to-peer, hierarchical, and centralized. DERConnect also enables cybersecurity test, social science tests, and advanced building controls. DERConnect will open to the research community in 2025. This paper describes DERConnect use cases and instructs potential future users of when and how to engage.