In October 2025 while serving as VP of Regulatory Reform at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, EquinoxDG principal Vaughan Woodruff provided a brief history of interconnection regulation in the U.S. in an article in Public Utilities Fortnightly.
As Woodruff highlights, the fragmented regulation of distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection has led to largely outdated and nonuniform interconnection regulations across the country:
IREC’s 2023 Freeing the Grid initiative, which compares state interconnection regulations to current best practices and issues a grade to each state, resulted in sixteen states receiving a D. These are states that either hadn’t touched their rules since adoption or had done so infrequently.
States that have not updated their interconnection rules since they were first adopted, today lack a majority of the enforceable regulations needed to streamline review processes, reduce costs, and improve transparency for interconnection applicants.
If we also count the thirteen states that leave interconnection processes to the discretion of the utilities, almost sixty percent of all states have rules that are not robust enough to effectively regulate interconnection should customers experience challenges. A notable exception is New Mexico, which significantly revised its interconnection rules in 2022 and was the only state to receive an A in our most recent update to Freeing the Grid.
Read the full article here.
