Becoming a large-scale prosumer, and taking advantage of the benefits of generating your own power and partnering with the local grid, includes a responsibility for grid interconnection and reliability. Analytics, standards, and operational protocols all come into play, requiring coordination with local grid officials. In this session well hear a case study from a major U.S. airport about the conceptual design and benefits to customers and airport owners when DERs are utilized to seamlessly island when connection to the grid is lost, case studies where load serving entities use solar and storage to benefit their customers, providing new opportunities for some of the nations oldest utilities, and a microgrid project currently underway at Montclair State University that will provide black start, islanding and load shedding ability to the University campus. Well also experience an informative journey through typical utility stakeholder touchpoints, critical path dependencies, engineering review cycles and leave with tips and tricks to streamline the interconnection process and answer the why does it take so long to interconnect my customer question.