Before the energy transition, utilities primarily concerned themselves with supply-side energy production and distribution. Demand-side considerations played a minimal role in maintaining reliability and balancing the grid.
Now, with the advent of the 'prosumer', that is producer/consumer of electricity, using solar power, wind turbines, battery storage, EVs, smart thermostats and other smart devices, customer inputs to the grid become important in load management.
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Utilities Need Flexible Load Management
Flexible Load Management (FLM) enables utilities to provide automated, coordinated, and aggregated real-time changes to grid-edge assets and devices without significantly impacting on customers. For example, FLM can reduce the temperature of a hot water heater in a household while leaving it high enough to ensure everyone is still comfortable with the hot water available.
Utilities should develop a FLM strategy now, to ensure that they are able to cope with the challenges of the future as increasing loads from electrification and grid reliability become increasingly dependent. Priorities should be: mitigating the impacts of aggressive building and transportation electrification, supporting GHG emission reduction goals, and integrating new renewable resources.
Utilities should also research and identify the incentives or retail tariffs that will benefits both the customer and the grid. For example, ensuring EVs are charged overnight and not at peak times during the day.
Furthermore, utilities should evaluate the investment needed to build increased electrification in their infrastructure, reviewing costs and benefits of addressing their locational and temporal grid needs and consider an FLM strategy as a way to ameliorate those costs.
Once the utility has planned a load management strategy, it should then implement it via customer pilots and programs. The data collected will inform utilities on the success or not of these programs. Which customers or groups will turn up a smart thermostat manually? Do they charge their EVs at a certain time? How much electricity do their DERs feed back to the grid? Accurate, comprehensive data – which modern devices and IoT can provide – will give utilities a clear look at their achievable load management capacity to enhance program implementation, and help future developments.
In conclusion, an FLM strategy will be necessary to stabilize the grid of the future and also manage costs, achieve clean energy goals, and meet the demands of electrification.