Supply Chain and Asset Traceability to Support the Clean Energy Transition

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act will pour billions of dollars into upgrading and expanding the electric grid to support the clean energy transition. Some of this funding will also be directed towards programs that increase the resiliency and security of the grid as described in DOE’s America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition. 

Utilities are rising to the clean energy challenge, but are simultaneously facing new challenges including supply chain shortages, labor shortages, cyber security threats, and more severe weather events. Part of the solution to these challenges is high quality datasets to support automation, analysis, and risk mitigation. Creating and maintaining high quality datasets from manufacturing through decommissioning provides a Digital Thread and allows stakeholders along the supply chain to add and access traceability information.  

An enabling technology for the Digital Thread is smart barcodes that link physical assets with their digital datasets. In order for this technology to get wide scale adoption, it must be based on industry standards that allow manufacturers, distributors, and asset owners to access and share data in a consistent manner. 

Other industries such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, food, and railroad have implemented industry standards allowing manufactures to apply barcodes that contain a unique ID, product attributes, and links to supporting datasets including supply chain, testing, and certification.  

The natural gas industry has also developed and implemented material traceability standards that allow manufacturers to apply 1D and 2D barcodes to pipes and fittings to provide standardized datasets for properties such as manufacturer, material type, size and lot code.

ASTM F2897 asset traceability barcodes applied by manufacturers

Natural gas utilities are leveraging the asset traceability barcode to verify materials, create digital as-builts, and create a high quality Digital Twin that allows analysis and risk mitigation. For example, a utility that had been capturing the traceability data from the barcodes detected a trend with a specific type of fitting with abnormally high leak rates. After communicating the results to the manufacturer, a recall was initiated and the utility was able to identify the precise location of all impacted fittings. 

Supply Chain and Asset Traceability for the Electric Grid

Electric utilities can also leverage the power of industry standard supply chain and asset traceability barcodes to address persistent and emerging risks. There are many use cases for barcodes that link to digital datasets, but here are a few important examples. 

Supply Chain Risks

To support the unprecedented growth of electric infrastructure, equipment manufacturers will be forced to expand their production capabilities, potentially sub-contracting some aspects of their supply chains and outsourcing their raw material acquisition. This rapid expansion of supply chain sources may impact overall quality of products.  

To address supply chain risks, utilities can scan assets upon receipt to verify the manufacturer and country of origin and to detect counterfeits. The quantity and location of recalled assets can easily be identified. The performance of new and unproven equipment, devices, and sensors that will be required to support the clean energy transition can be tracked and monitored.

Severe Weather Events and Emergency Response

Severe weather events that cause outages require a quick response and utilities may need to receive assets from a nearby utility as part of mutual assistance. The electrical and mechanical properties of these assets need to be verified to ensure system compatibility. Industry standard barcodes would allow utilities to verify compatibility in real-time. 

As-built documentation might not be a top priority for field crews working hard to restore service during a severe weather outage. But the ability to scan barcodes on assets to create a digital as-built will allow crews to capture the required data quickly and without impacting their efficiency during an emergency.   

Labor Shortages

Utilities are facing increased labor shortages both in the field and in the office. Barcode scanning and digital datasets can reduce the labor required to retrieve, interpret, and enter data into backend systems of record. Natural gas utilities have reported up to a 70% reduction in labor and cycle time required to close-out projects and get as-built data into GIS. 

Cyber Security

To address cyber security threats, utilities can utilize standardized digital datasets that include a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to create an inventory of software, firmware, and connected devices embedded in hardware. This will ensure that utilities can quickly react to emergent cyber threats that could impact software-enabled hardware. 

Having critical electric grid assets marked with industry standard barcodes that link to a digital dataset is a vision of the future. It will take collaboration and coordination between manufacturers, distributors, asset owners, and technology providers to make it a reality.