Contributed by Oscar Tillberg, Head of Global Sales, Network Control, Hitachi Energy
In the global power system of 2050, we will need an estimated four times today’s generation capacity and to transfer three times as much electrical energy. With this excessive demand, accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral energy system will require adapting and adopting policies and regulations that enable technology and new business models to support scalable, flexible, and secure energy systems.
To meet those aggressive energy demands and carbon neutrality goals, utilities must urgently shift from reactive to proactive grid management. While making this shift is simple enough on paper, putting proactive grid management into practice is a heavy endeavor.
Today, huge volumes of data are being collected from across the grid and fed into a central control room where utilities ensure service reliability for residential, industrial, and commercial customers around the region. But monitoring energy flow and managing grid assets from a central control room isn’t new. Utilities have long-maintained 24×7 crews set up with big, multi-screen monitors and real-time meters, ensuring power is optimally transferred between substations.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have been around for decades, providing real-time insights into distributed assets. To construct an accurate picture of what truly is going on across an organization’s grid or network, SCADA should be paired with power applications – think energy management system (EMS), generation management system (GMS), and advanced distribution management system (ADMS), which perform complex calculations. Together, SCADA and power applications harmonize data, surface trends, and anomalies, and deliver crucial, actionable insights.
However, the decentralization of today’s grids due to renewable generation from many small sources has created an explosion of data (SCADA and otherwise) and added complexity – necessitating the need for 24×7 monitoring and management across the generation, transmission, and distribution stages of the electrical system.
The problem is that each stage in the energy supply and demand lifecycle has traditionally been siloed, each with its own infrastructure, networking protocols, datasets, and schemas. Bringing these silos together enables collaboration amongst different departments within a company. For operators, that means they can have accurate situational awareness of the grid and its assets and ultimately improve profitability. These holistic control rooms—set up and operated properly with the right risk mitigation—help utilities and independent power producers (IPPs) provide reliable, clean, and affordable power to millions of people and businesses.
The grid is evolving
The introduction of renewable sources to energy production has radically changed power grids. Instead of generating power from a few carbon-based plants, generation now comes from a massive, distributed network of thousands – even millions – of touchpoints across the grid. Making matters worse is the fact that renewable generation is not as consistent or reliable as oil, gas, or coal-fired plants. Solar can only be generated during the day when the sun is shining. Windmills only generate power on breezy days. And hydropower can drop off during droughts or low tides.
Managing this dynamic generation, smoothing out the cycles, and ensuring safe, reliable electricity distribution to customers is an extremely complex undertaking. Renewables generate mountains of data that grid operators use to manage the energy lifecycle, but much of the data goes unused, lost out of the edge of the network before the data can be fed to the utility’s central control room. Some estimates say that utilities use less than five percent of the data generated across the grid because of integration issues due to varying protocols, structures, and schemas. This has created a major observability challenge for control rooms, preventing them from getting a good understanding of grid status and performance at every stage of the energy lifecycle.
The control room of the future is collaborative
Utilities and IPPs need to build the control room of the future that can solve these data integration issues and provide operators with the visibility and control they need to optimize electricity flow across all stages in the energy lifecycle. This can be achieved through a holistic network management platform that collects and analyzes SCADA data to provide observability and unified control into power generation, transmission, and distribution – allowing operators to identify bottlenecks across the grid, predict maintenance needs, make quick decisions in the moment, and enable automated responses to critical events.
Here are three things to keep in mind when implementing a holistic network management solution in your control room of the future:
1. Integrate disparate datasets
Your network management solution should be able to ingest and integrate data from across the energy lifecycle and other third-party sources while providing critical context that leads to actionable information. This includes SCADA data, including distribution management information, load monitoring, power quality, equipment status, and asset performance to other data types, such as weather forecasts, GIS data, and maintenance logs. It all needs to be transformed and fed into a single dashboard where it can be monitored and put into the right context.
2. Ensure data resilience
It’s important to remember that operators rarely deal with certainty. Instead, they are given a range of probabilities that they need to weigh the validity of multiple sources to determine the next best action. Each data point brings its own level of context to the situation like a single piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle. Operators in the control room of the future need to be able to trust the data and insights that are being fed to them. Only then can they weigh the dizzying levels of datasets that flow into their network management solution. This requires basic data hygiene that ensures the data is reliable, recoverable in case of data loss, and secure from outside tampering, manipulation, or theft.
3. Create actionable insights
Your solution should also use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language model (AI/ML/LLM) technology to trigger automated responses to critical events. For example, AI could detect events that are likely to lead to an asset or transformer failure and automatically close the loop to bypass the affected infrastructure – all within seconds before the surge causes a disruption of service or an equipment failure sparks a destructive wildfire or other hazardous situation that puts maintenance crews, emergency personnel, and the public in danger. In other, less critical instances, having all the data in one location gives operators the proper context to make the right decisions quickly based on their unique experience and expertise.
One platform to rule them all
Today’s electrical grids are extremely complex and decentralized – creating a major data crunch for grid operators. To deal with this, utilities and IPPs need to build the control room of the future that allows operators to collaborate across the entire energy lifecycle from generation to transmission to distribution. A holistic network management solution can ingest SCADA data and other data types, and through EMS, ADMS, and GMS applications, put it into the right context and create actionable insights that enable fast yet thorough action and decision-making. Today’s grids will continue to evolve, and making the best use of the data you are already collecting is the most surefire way to simplify operations and optimize the flow of energy from generation to homes and businesses.
