“Digital twins” have been global industry buzz words for the past few years, especially in the electricity sector. Today’s electricity network challenges – efficiencies, pushes for cleaner fuels, storms, and more – have driven operators to search for newer, more effective methods for examining assets, analyzing operations, and preparing for impactful events. Powered by cloud computing and the need for innovation, the virtual representations of infrastructure have become an operational reality. Today we see digital twins providing value in numerous areas for utilities. This article will examine the top four areas digital twins can greatly benefit the electricity sector today – renewables, carbon footprint, vegetation management and engineering analysis.
Decarbonizing Energy Systems with Digital Twins
There are a variety of ways that companies are integrating digital twin technology to reduce their carbon footprint, including the influx of solar, wind, and geothermal elements. While each is a different form of renewable energy, they are experiencing many of the same challenges.
The most challenging barrier to decarbonizing energy systems is often the way in which the utility's business operates. Subsequently, a utility’s operations are where digital twin technology can provide the highest impact. The digital twin is an incredibly detailed representation of a business's field infrastructure. Rather than sending out teams to view and assess a specific asset, digital twins allow operators to handle all of the assessment virtually, therefore reducing the number of trips teams would typically make to the field to manually assess. This also lowers the number of trucks needed to be deployed, which can result in cost savings. Success in this area was recently achieved by a utility who partnered with Neara, a global SaaS company that provides a physics-enabled platform that builds digital twins of critical infrastructure networks and assets. Using Neara’s technology, the utility saved about $5 million per year by reducing the number of trucks deployed into the field. Directly correlated with the company’s cost and labor savings is its carbon footprint reduction.
Utilities need to be able to simulate their operations in a cost-effective and accurate manner while maintaining accurate communications with regulators regarding system functions. With a digital twin, companies can build simulated operation models and forecast performance remotely, bearing optimization without disruption. By automating the discipline of your operations and its optimization parameters, the benefits are collective; reduction of workforce measures, costs, and carbon footprint all at an accelerated pace.
Optimizing Vegetation Management with Digital Twins
Vegetation management is often the costliest, most consequential part of maintaining utility systems in terms of the high risk it poses to the network, public safety, and service delivery. Many utilities are currently having to implement tree-by-tree cutting plans, which is time-consuming and not always accurate. Tree growth and fall-in potential are preventatively analyzed within these plans, typically with optical data. But optical data is not as expansive as digital twin content.
To improve on this process, Neara’s digital twin uses LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scans to enable customized vegetation and ground clearance analysis, 3D visualization, prioritization, risk analysis, and cost analysis in a single integrated platform. The system records data including tree species and distinctive encroachment zones, down to the position of every tree branch lining a network. Over time, the meticulous data stored in the platform allows utilities to determine how trees will grow, in which locations and at what rate. Utilities can set up and iterate on their entire vegetation management process, from raw LiDAR import to encroachment zone compliance, to optimization, to building dashboards and reports for internal and external teams. While there is a higher cost to applying digital twin software to operations up front, the efficiencies granted by the predictive capabilities are invaluable and can help save substantial costs in the long-run.
Digital Twins and Engineering Analysis
Digital twins are a key component of asset management, providing an all-encompassing view of a utility's infrastructure as well as data points. After collecting a utility’s network data, utilities can then evaluate it through engineering analysis – also referred to as finite element analysis – which takes every equipment asset existing in an electric utility system and runs a series of analyses against it. The tool can run up to thousands of automated evaluations at once, uncovering hidden risks like conductor breakage or cascading pole failure. This information validates maintenance planning and supports valuable programs, like wildfire risk mitigation or grid hardening, to ensure the proper data underpins equipment maintenance cycles.
The same data captured can be leveraged for predictive analytics, enabling utilities to spot issues before they become problems. With greater accuracy than traditional methods, engineering analysis proactively guards against equipment failure, ensuring secure, reliable delivery of electricity. Digital twins can give utilities the analytics to plan for impacts before they happen, like knowing when a power line has to be re-strung or a transformer needs to be replaced. With this knowledge, utility networks can become more resilient and structured.
Digital Twins for Renewable Energy Integration
Utilities today are faced with a new challenge: the push for renewable energy integration. What is seen to be increasingly difficult for utilities is identifying and managing transmission lines at scale. Utility providers may think their infrastructure is fully utilized when in reality it isn’t. Often utilities are running under line capacity and the network isn't at range for integrations and usage. Even when this is only occurring in sporadic areas, utilities run the risk of operating with a large margin gap. Digital twins can comprehensively analyze a utility network and provide highly accurate results that identify the gaps so that utilities may eliminate them. These gaps can be the areas where integration of renewables can happen safely given their current underutilization.
Another solution digital twins can provide is streamlining the approval process. For instance, when expanding different fuel sources for a utility in the U.S. the approval process by state and federal agencies is inefficient. In some cases it can take up to 10 years for fuel expansion approval due to extensive stakeholder negotiations involving the utility, public utility commissions (PUCs), environmental advocacy groups, consumer advocacy groups, utility customers, electricity generators, and the renewable energy technology industry. In addition, new builds of line structures, such as lines to renewable farms, currently have no “in” to the industry and the ability to iterate processes rapidly is absent, as 1) applications are taken in order of submission regardless of value or size, 2) renewable energy requires the use of significant amounts of land so finding a specific location is a problem (i.e. wind turbines must be spaced out evenly across farms, which means they cannot be tucked into small spaces), and 3) there is an information barrier since content has to be shared between the many players.
To improve the process, digital twins can help create a streamlined model where all parties involved in a network can view, access and contribute to the digital model all on one platform. It allows users to view changes instantly and assemble full ramifications on a project. Various parties can also input existing constraints, rules and scenarios so that projects can quickly be pre-assessed for viability before troubling partners that process them. Digital twins accelerate the approval process amongst partners and certify compliance while illustrating the plan, its variables and requirements. The system gathers 90% of the suggested projects before they reach the agencies, enabling fast processing of viable renewable energy projects.
Digital twins also give access to distributed energy resources (DER) measurements, allowing utilities to manage and monitor network availability. Utilities can verify capacity via digital twin modeling and load flow modeling to add solar and EV chargers, giving further insight to enable greater renewable sources.
Unlimited Possibilities
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to benefits for digital twin solutions with utilities as this article just touched on four key high level areas. Digital twins are reshaping the foundations of engineering by combining data from human experts with machine intelligence to drive the evolution of work in new and unexplored ways. Increased use in digital twin technology will continue to add value, resilience, and efficiency to utility operating models. Utilities have seen so much value and potential with this technology in just these past few years. Imagine the impact companies will have five years from now.
