Load orchestration plays an important role in both homes and businesses. Distributed energy sources or DERs and renewable energy such as wind, solar and electric vehicles, heat pumps, battery storage and new types of load devices may be the single most disruptive influence in the electric grid’s history. Renewable energy has quickly become the second largest source of electricity in the world and DERs challenge both distribution and transmission grid operations.
DERs and renewables can involve a lot of actors and organizations within the ecosystem of electricity and must be orchestrated to ensure grid reliability and resiliency. The growth of DERs and renewables in recent years has been fueled by various regulatory drivers to address the problem of climate change through decarbonization. The growth is also propelled by reducing costs in DER and renewable technologies and the emergence of various third-party aggregators. Aggregators package DERs into various innovative service offerings for people who produce and consume energy.
However, it is important to understand that aggregators are not responsible for the operations of the grid. Their business models are around electric vehicle car-sharing, energy bill reduction, zero emissions buildings and so on. The rise of businesses and people who produce and consume electricity leveraging these services is very challenging to the traditional electrical grid model.
Orchestration
Electric utilities should adapt to the impacts of DERs and renewables, including people and businesses who produce and consume electricity and have run pilot projects to understand how to manage them for grid resiliency and reliability with the help of energy management systems. When examining the situation today, we see a grid operator’s business process is affected by DERs and renewables. Therefore, orchestration should reach out to every corner of the organization in a consistent way.
Transmission operators do balancing with demand and grid supply daily. Distribution operators should ensure continuity and quality of service to their consumers. Power regulators expect all this to be done efficiently and securely. However, in some areas, there is more electricity being fed to the distribution grid directly than there is to the energy transmission grid.
Utilities need an end-to-end solution to accurately coordinate how they monitor, model, forecast, control and dispatch DERs across external and internal, stakeholders and systems. DER model orchestration will ensure that the DEO digital models feeding into the advanced transmission management systems, the advanced market management systems, and the advanced distribution management systems are powerful and accurate and kept in full sync with the changes occurring on the side of people or businesses who generate and consume electricity. A network digital twin provides a model view of the electrical grid and can ensure accurate electrical connectivity.
Asking the right questions
Both distribution and transmission grid operators need to understand the impact of load orchestration and DERs. At each level, the operators can monitor energy orchestration in the ADMS of the utility to ensure information flows into the AEMS directly so that real-time situational awareness is shared accurately and consistently between both levels.