Authors:Â Sandeep Choudhury (Digital Practitioner, TCS), Anindya Pradhan (Utility Value Discovery Advisor, TCS), Tapas Laha (Digital Practitioner, TCS), Uttam Kundu (Digital Practitioner, TCS)
Distributed Energy Resources (DER), an opportunity for Utility
DER is one of biggest opportunity for the utility industry today along with the prosumer empowerment. Utilities today are looking for new roles and responsibilities while making a transition from the energy seller to the affinity service providers. DER act as a key building block in this utility’s transformation journey.
Low carbon energy provider is emerging as one of the most preferred roles for the utilities. It’s also acting as a catalyst in many of the other new roles for the utilities such as Microgrid manager, EV infrastructure manager or connected home service providers.
The key functions of the DER value chain are DER planning, forecasting, network analysis, integration of DER, simulation & modelling, operation & monitoring, empowering the prosumers and new business models.
The fluctuating nature of the DER is a challenge for utilities in managing the demand. Managing scenarios such as Peer to Peer trading (P2P Trading) or EV charging demands an infrastructure which is elastic in nature.
Digital technology on Cloud plays a very important role in providing an infrastructure which is elastic, dynamic and flexible in nature to address the dynamic needs of the DER use cases across the value chain.
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Digital prospects across the DER value chain
Digitalization has significantly boost up the flexibility of the grids and operation with DERs. However, different stages in DER value chain exhibits different characteristics and requires separate digital focus to achieve the desired flexibility, ease, and optimization.
The expansion of DER is motivating Utilities in realizing the Net Zero objective and also reduce increasing pressure on the grids. However, un-predictability of the DER generation due to high weather dependency (like solar, wind etc.) is posing a big challenge for Utilities renewable planning. Utilities are looking to integrate different data sources (for example – weather data, history records etc.) through APIficaton to build the right level of insights for reliable renewable planning.
er to peer (P2P) energy trading1 is anticipated to be vital for next Gen Utilities. This should help reduce the power outages and increase overall efficiency of the utilities. The success of P2P will depend on number of aspects such as accuracy of renewable forecasting, efficient energy routing amongst prosumer and consumers, distributed financial transactions etc. Technologies like AI/ML, High Performance Computing and Block Chain will play a pivotal role to achieve effective P2P energy trading.
Integration of renewable2 to the power grid involves joining distributed power electronics interfaced devices (PEIDs) in a closed feedback loop to balance the available power vs consumption. The control and orchestration of these distributed assets will need faster decision-making capability which can be fulfilled by enabling IoT and real-time analytics.
Utilities have been doing power Simulation and Modelling for many years. However, the complexity gets much higher with DER introduction due to unpredictable load simulation, bidirectional energy flow by introducing more prosumers, etc. Improved capabilities on AI/ML, Neural Networking and advanced energy systems have eased the DER modelling complexity and is helping achieve the grid reliability and safety limits.
DER has uniquely affected the ways of Utility operation. Day by day increasing share of DER power generation, demands more monitoring and control. On the other hand, many of the current Utilities setup lacks detailed visibility of beyond the meter’s resources. Smart meters, smart inverters, energy smart communities are steadily taking up the market and being current focus of Utilities. Â
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Cloud as a key digital accelerator
Retrospectively, DER management system is perceived as a set of real time systems which are predominantly on premise. This at times has limited the digital capabilities and has limited the scope for innovation. In recent times, cloud is one of the key digital enablers for DER Management. Some of the key capabilities which makes role of cloud imperative for DER are:
- High Performance Computing – Cloud provides easy to use, secure, high performing, elastic compute capacity to cater to the demands of renewable planning, forecasting, network analysis and Peer to Peer trading.
- Analytics, AI/ML – Cloud provides a range of services for high performant processing for real time insights, machine learning to deliver highly accurate planning, forecasts, integration of renewables, simulation and modelling etc.
- IoT – Cloud based managed IoT services provides real-time integration with wide range of distributed physical devices. It enables business intelligence for faster response and situational awareness.
- Blockchain – Cloud provides secure, managed, and resilient Blockchain platform for efficient peer to peer trading.
- APIficaton – Integration and API management on cloud provides capability to integrate with DER ecosystems at scale. Low-Cost and Durable Storage – Cloud provides very low-cost and durable storage to manage the surge of data due to introduction of mass scales smart devices.
- Rapid Scalability – Cloud services provides very easy and hassle-free scaling solutions to deal with
In summary, renewable planning, forecasting, simulation, modelling and integration of renewables extensively rely on leveraging enterprise analytics, AI, ML and IoT capabilities. With emergence of DER, the frequency of data processing nowadays vary from microsecond to decades. In the same line, empowering prosumers require high performing digital channels and analytics. The channels are also required to scale up/down during peak/off-peak hours to optimize run cost. The demand for all these digital capabilities makes it very relevant for cloud hosting.
DER orchestration and operations require utmost control by the utilities and should enforce regulatory requirements. Additionally, there are also reservation from the stakeholders to move these critical applications to cloud.
Conclusion
Across the globe, we are seeing utility companies have started using cloud-based data platform for DER use cases. The most common ones are simulation and modelling of the renewables, dynamic operating envelope calculation, renewable planning & forecasting to mention a few. Strategic alliances with niche solution vendors are one of the key strategies adopted by the utilities to address the last mile adoption of the cloud.
Cloud is also playing a complemental role in generating exponential value with other digital forces such as AI/ML, IoT, 5G and Blockchain.
On the other hand, factors like compliance and control requirements are constraining adoption of cloud in some of the DER areas. We believe, with progressive advancement in cloud offerings and changing regulatory norms, it might not be far for these areas to look equally compelling for cloud hosting.
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[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325775269_Peer_to_Peer_Distributed_Energy_Trading_in_Smart_Grids_A_SurveyÂ
[2]Â https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/CEC-500-2021-030.pdf