Tim O’Connor is a career operator. And operations at a utility, he said, used to be a sleepy gig.
As the chief operations officer for Xcel Energy, O’Connor is charged with leading the utility to 80% carbon-free electricity supply by 2030, and 100% by 2050.
Intermittent renewable energy will drive much of Xcel’s decarbonization push. That means 3,000 MW of intermittent resources can appear and disappear in a matter of minutes.
What’s more, distributed energy resources (DERs), present a separate set of challenges.
“I have to figure out how to make these things work even though the engineer side of me says ‘I don’t know how to do that yet,'” O’Connor said. “It takes a completely different kind of communication, a completely different type of connectivity.”
For many of the largest utilities, like Xcel, private communications networks are seen as the key to “make these things work.”
O’Connor shared those comments in October during a conference hosted by the Utility Broadband Alliance, an organization formed in 2019 to promote a utility industry transition to private communication networks.
Making things work
An early leader in the private communications space was Southern Company, through its subsidiary Southern Linc. It paved the way by building a 4G private LTE network in 2016. Other utilities followed suit, including San Diego Gas & Electric, Evergy, and Ameren.
When Southern Linc made its business case for private LTE in 2011, there wasn’t a utility case study to back up the idea. Even at the first UBBA summit in 2019, Southern was the only utility in the country that had deployed a private LTE network.
But now, only four years later, the case has been made.
“We didn’t have a good answer (then). You have a good answer today,” said Alan McIntyre, Southern Linc’s engineering director.
Xcel is deploying its own network through a partnership with Nokia and Anterix. The project is meant to support data connectivity and new levels of automation, and the network technologies will back a growing mix of renewable power sources for Xcel.
The pressing need for connectivity, O’Connor said, is due to the grid evolving from just the transmission system to “all of the wires.” That seismic shift requires a “very different kind of mindset,” he said.
With the potential for millions of distributed devices across Xcel’s eight-state territory, there’s simply no way to intelligently communicate with those assets, including electric vehicle, using traditional means.
“We can’t run communication to all of the places we potentially can get energy from,” said Eric Levin, Xcel’s chief architect. “How do we have reliable communication with these distributed energy resources, where we need to be able to control those to create stability on the grid? But ultimately have to do it in a in a way that scales.”
Customer and policymaker expectations could require a doubling, or more, of current communication infrastructure, O’Connor added. And quickly.
Making the case
Around 2016, Xcel made the decision to own all of its operational technology infrastructure from end-to-end. But it didn’t set out to justify the (sizeable) private LTE investment.
Instead, Xcel examined all of its businesses: devices currently deployed, devices expected in the coming years, and capital and operations budget forecasts.
The analysis approach, as opposed to making the case for a particular solution, sold Xcel executives on the merits of private LTE, according to Wendall Reimer, who leads the utility’s OT network operations. The process took two years to receive approval.
Similarly, Ameren, which serves 2.4 million electric customers in Missouri and Illinois, attempted to envision the smart grid of the future. That effort began in 2015.
Ameren’s business leaders believed the grid would soon feature enhanced sensor technology, with more data than ever before. A truly digital utility.
“You start to lay it out there and you say, ‘How are we going to support that?'” said Chris Vana, Ameren’s senior director of digital technology.
Vana said the keys to Ameren’s private LTE adoption centered around the rising costs of public communication networks and the business needs that it saw lurking just around the corner.
Ameren pulled together all of the telecommunications costs from its various business lines and started paying them from the business budgets, instead of from the far-smaller digital or IT budgets.
Private LTE also allowed Ameren to reign in costs and recapture control from network carriers–which can change technology on a whim–if they so choose.
“It wasn’t a technology solution looking for a home, it was a business problem looking for a solution,” Vana said. “What that meant was that our business people were engaged on day one, and by having the business people engaged on day one, you’ve not got the core company making your technical argument.”
