Consolidated Edison (Con Edison) is an investor-owned energy company that provides electric and gas service to the residents and businesses of New York City and Westchester County, and steam service to businesses and residents in Manhattan. Con Edison’s electrical system connects more than 3.5 million customers to energy sources and serves almost 40% of New York State’s electric demand while only covering about 1% of the state’s geographic footprint.

Con Edison’s system serves customers in all five boroughs of New York City as well as Westchester County, located directly north of New York City. Con Edison’s system is different than other utilities in New York State because it has an extensive underground, networked distribution system. This system poses unique challenges to distributed energy resource (DER) implementation, as listed below:

• The network system requires special consideration when integrating DER to provide load relief at the distribution level as compared to non-network systems.
• High load density and network design can absorb distributed generation interconnection more readily than non-network systems by spreading the power in multiple directions, but the efficacy of the relief provided by such DER is lessened for these same reasons.

• The cost of the portfolio of DER solutions for networked systems is higher to meet load relief needs.

In New York City, Con Edison covers more than 750,000 buildings and 3 million housing units that encompass approximately 5 billion square feet of floor space. In Westchester, Con Edison’s coverage includes approximately 30,000 businesses and organizations and 350,000 housing units within 450 square miles.