<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Anne Pramaggiore, President and CEO of ComEd of Chicago, was the first at the Smart Gird Interoperability Panel 2016 Grid Modernization Summit in Washington DC to call the current business transformation that the electric power industry is experiencing a revolution.* But many other speakers agreed with this characterization.* Frequently mentioned were the regulatory and utility business transformations occurring in California and New York (REV). *Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) was mentioned as an example of a utility that was aggressively driving change in the utility business model.*
Robert Wilhite of Navigant Research pointed out that their recent research had found that 90% of utilities recognize that utility business models have to change.* But there are different opinions about the urgency of this transformation.* Navigant found that about half believe that it has to happen immediately, while the remainder believe it can happen later.*
Of course none of this would be possible without the enabling technology of the smart grid.* Dave Velazguez, President and CEO of Pepco, now part of Exelon, recollected that the first smart grid development at Pepco, by no means a laggard in adopting new technology, occurred only a decade ago.
Distributed energy
Virtually every speaker singled out distributed energy (DER), especially solarPV, as the main motivating driver that is forcing the business transformation of the utility industry.** Originally seen as a response to a warming climate, solarPV has achieved grid parity in several parts of the country and is seen as a way of providing customers not only with a choice of a green energy source but increasingly as a less expensive alternative to the local utility. * The price drop has been so substantial that even at a time of unusually low natural gas prices that are responsible for closing many coal-fired generation plants solarPV is achieving grid parity in many parts of North America.* Another important contributor to the revolution is the electrification of transportation, not only EVs but also buses, rail and even trucks.**
But none of this could have happened without the enabling platform of the smart grid.** The conjunction of technological advances in packet switched wired and wireless communications networks, intelligent electronic devices underlies the DER advances that have created choice for customers.* As we have seen previously in other industries such as telecom consumers have grasped the opportunity and are now beginning to drive changes in the energy market.
Microgrids
Another topic that came up repeatedly was microgrids.* Duke Energy has been running microgrid pilot for several years from which emerged the OpenFMB standard with an OpenFMB working group to support the effort. ComEd has five microgrid pilots and is starting the country's first microgrid cluster.* Pepco has two microgrid projects underway.
At the Distributech 2016 and at this SGIP Summit an implementation of OpenFMB demonstrated live by Green Energy Corp.* It was also announced at the summit that the source code was now available for download from the openFMB.io site.*
In addition a number of vendors were offering solutions for managing microgrids including the KEPCO Consortium from Korea who has built a comprehensive microgrid solution.
Geospatial
Although this was not a geospatially-focussed conference, GIS and geospatial technology came up in several areas.
Chanda Visweswanah, an IBM fellow, outlined in three topics what the the challenge is in transforming the grid.* First, there are several trends that are behaving exponentially, the number of sensors, the volume of data, and renewable energy sources were among them.* Secondly, we are increasingly relying on intermittent energy sources like wind and solarPV.* Third, this is not you grandmother's software.* This is software that provides a platform that supports sophisticated mathematical algorithms.* One of the most important of these are algorithms that nowcast and forecast weather at a very high resolution so that it is possible to predict wind velocity not at ground level but at the elevation of the turbines and at the location of the wind farm.* Similarly for insolation for solarPV.* These wind and insolation maps are effectively are the generation forecast minutes and hours in advance.
The Kepco Consortium demonstrated the
أكثر...
Robert Wilhite of Navigant Research pointed out that their recent research had found that 90% of utilities recognize that utility business models have to change.* But there are different opinions about the urgency of this transformation.* Navigant found that about half believe that it has to happen immediately, while the remainder believe it can happen later.*
Of course none of this would be possible without the enabling technology of the smart grid.* Dave Velazguez, President and CEO of Pepco, now part of Exelon, recollected that the first smart grid development at Pepco, by no means a laggard in adopting new technology, occurred only a decade ago.
Distributed energy
Virtually every speaker singled out distributed energy (DER), especially solarPV, as the main motivating driver that is forcing the business transformation of the utility industry.** Originally seen as a response to a warming climate, solarPV has achieved grid parity in several parts of the country and is seen as a way of providing customers not only with a choice of a green energy source but increasingly as a less expensive alternative to the local utility. * The price drop has been so substantial that even at a time of unusually low natural gas prices that are responsible for closing many coal-fired generation plants solarPV is achieving grid parity in many parts of North America.* Another important contributor to the revolution is the electrification of transportation, not only EVs but also buses, rail and even trucks.**
But none of this could have happened without the enabling platform of the smart grid.** The conjunction of technological advances in packet switched wired and wireless communications networks, intelligent electronic devices underlies the DER advances that have created choice for customers.* As we have seen previously in other industries such as telecom consumers have grasped the opportunity and are now beginning to drive changes in the energy market.
Microgrids
Another topic that came up repeatedly was microgrids.* Duke Energy has been running microgrid pilot for several years from which emerged the OpenFMB standard with an OpenFMB working group to support the effort. ComEd has five microgrid pilots and is starting the country's first microgrid cluster.* Pepco has two microgrid projects underway.
At the Distributech 2016 and at this SGIP Summit an implementation of OpenFMB demonstrated live by Green Energy Corp.* It was also announced at the summit that the source code was now available for download from the openFMB.io site.*
In addition a number of vendors were offering solutions for managing microgrids including the KEPCO Consortium from Korea who has built a comprehensive microgrid solution.
Geospatial
Although this was not a geospatially-focussed conference, GIS and geospatial technology came up in several areas.
Chanda Visweswanah, an IBM fellow, outlined in three topics what the the challenge is in transforming the grid.* First, there are several trends that are behaving exponentially, the number of sensors, the volume of data, and renewable energy sources were among them.* Secondly, we are increasingly relying on intermittent energy sources like wind and solarPV.* Third, this is not you grandmother's software.* This is software that provides a platform that supports sophisticated mathematical algorithms.* One of the most important of these are algorithms that nowcast and forecast weather at a very high resolution so that it is possible to predict wind velocity not at ground level but at the elevation of the turbines and at the location of the wind farm.* Similarly for insolation for solarPV.* These wind and insolation maps are effectively are the generation forecast minutes and hours in advance.
أكثر...