When the books are closed on 2024, the electric power industry will look back on a series of historic challenges and accomplishments. Perhaps one of the most striking and compelling developments for the industry? Increasingly broad recognition of substantial long-term growth in demand for electricity.
Late last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission nearly doubled its five-year demand growth projection, from 2.6 percent to 4.7 percent. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation predicted peak demand growth of up to 38 gigawatts through 2028. That’s the equivalent of powering more than 28 million homes.
Notably, this growth stems from multiple drivers. In addition to broad economic and population growth, transportation and other industries are becoming increasingly electrified. And, the growth of innovative technologies—data centers, edge computing, AI, new battery and chip factories, and much more—also is spurring greater electricity demand.
Meeting this customer demand is only one of the electric power industry’s priorities. Utilities are committed to enhancing resilience and grid security in the face of extreme weather and threats from hostile actors. Meeting customers’ expectations for clean energy, together with technology and market developments, are contributing to utilities diversifying and decarbonizing the electricity fuel mix.
Utilities cannot take a business-as-usual approach to addressing all these strategic priorities. To position themselves—and their customers and communities—for a more reliable, secure, clean energy future, the industry must embrace digital solutions and advanced connectivity to accelerate innovation and resilience. Simply put, a modern grid requires modern communications.
Modern connectivity is at the heart of utilities’ efforts to digitize the grid. Digitization of the electric grid refers to the process of integrating advanced digital technologies like sensors, smart meters, and communications networks into power grid infrastructure. This enables real-time monitoring, control and optimization of electric flow, improving grid reliability, efficiency, and smart grid transformation.
Enabling these data-centric digital solutions is more than just turning on a switch. Utilities need to formulate comprehensive approaches to gathering, transmitting, analyzing, and acting upon this data. Doing all this requires a communications network that unlocks the efficient, more reliable, and secure solutions they need today, while spurring innovation and optionality for decades to come.
Grid digitization represents a quantum leap in utilities’ capabilities, unlocking a broad range of valuable outcomes for the grid and for electricity customers:
- Improved grid reliability, thanks to faster fault detection and isolation. This, in turn, leads to reduced outages.
- Enhanced grid resilience: With real-time data and insights on grid operating conditions, utilities are better able to manage disruptions caused by events like extreme weather.
- Integration of renewable energy: Grid digitization facilitates the seamless integration of variable renewable sources like solar, wind, and batteries.
- Demand response management: Enables utilities to incentivize customers to adjust electricity usage during peak demand periods.
- Cost optimization: By improving operational efficiencies, utilities potentially can identify and exploit cost savings throughout their grids.
Already, leading utilities are recognizing the transformative potential of broadband connectivity. By establishing private wireless broadband networks, utilities can unlock the full capabilities of modern grid technologies. This critical infrastructure, akin to a third grid, complements traditional transmission and distribution systems, enabling advanced grid operations, enhanced security and resiliency, improved customer experiences, and accelerated integration of renewable energy resources.
The 900 MHz movement—spearheaded by seven leading utilities and Anterix—is revolutionizing our nation’s utilities. By leveraging the powerful family of technologies centered on 900 MHz, utilities’ robust and more secure private broadband networks enable real-time data collection, advanced grid automation, and improved communication between devices.
With 900 MHz private wireless broadband networks, utilities enjoy the communications scale, greater security, and reliability they need to support smart grid technologies and solutions—from renewables integration to assisting with wildfire prevention and mitigation, distribution automation, enhanced cybersecurity, AMI 2.0, and much more. Their grids also benefit from leveraging seamless and more secure networks to bring together powerful and intelligent grid edge computing devices and other advanced sensors and controls.
Utilities with 900 MHz private wireless communications networks further benefit from the ecosystem of technologies and solutions represented by the 100+ members of the Anterix Active Ecosystem. Having access to this broad and deep range of tested, proven technologies is another means to ensure that utilities can bring value to their customers through their licensed, private communications networks.
More and more, customers and communities are looking to utilities not only for the energy that powers their lives—they are expecting the energy grid to be the backbone of a cleaner, more resilient economy. With this expectation in mind, utilities must embrace grid-wide digitization to enhance reliability, resilience, and cybersecurity, as well as to integrate more renewables and provide the data needed to harness AI in the utility sector.
As they have many times before, utilities must embrace innovation to meet today’s challenges—and that means extending digitization throughout their operations and bringing it to the grid edge. By adopting private broadband networks, utilities can leverage a strategic asset that advances their goals to modernize their infrastructure, advance resiliency and security objectives, improve operational efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction. This strategic shift will help to position utilities as leaders of the energy transition.