 | Vol 1., No. 12 October 17, 2023 Scott Clearwater, Gridmetrics, Inc.® s.clearwater-c@gridmetrics.io |
Recently, PG&E Corporation, the major utility in Northern California servicing 16 million people, held a one-day conference to elicit the innovation community as it moves forward in its goals of reliability for “future-proofing” PG&E.[1] PG&E identified nearly 70 high priority problems they are seeking to address through “breakthrough foundational research.” PG&E is leading the nation in distributed energy resources (DERs) which puts additional requirements on the traditional grid architecture. Overall, electrification is happening rapidly which puts additional onus on a utility to monitor the grid because of new sources of load and supply.
We now look into more detail of their 143-page report and how Gridmetrics is uniquely positioned to help deal with many of their priority problems. Some of the areas of interest are pretty obvious but others are non-intuitive. Excerpts from their report will be in italics. From their report (p.27):
Automated grid edge computing capabilities will make the grid more resilient by automatically monitoring and managing rapidly changing conditions on the transmission and distribution systems and balancing the system without human intervention. These capabilities are also critical to improving reliability and safety by automatically detecting faults and enabling a more rapid and targeted response to minimize ignition risk.
As stated, tantamount to this desired resilience is automatic monitoring. In other words, one of their challenges is finding hyper-local solutions that are yet time-invariant to the evolving dynamics of the grid. Gridmetrics has hundreds of sensors in PG&E’s service area on the distribution lines providing voltage measurements at 5-minute intervals. The next-generation Gridmetrics sensors provide voltage measurements at rates up to 10kHz which clearly satisfies PG&E’s need for “managing rapidly changing conditions on the …distribution system …”
Now we look into more detail of some of the areas that PG&E identified to be of particular interest and a number of them fit nicely into Gridmetrics’ current and future capabilities.
1. Supply and Load Management (p.72):
1.1 Currently lacking visibility for DERs, need real-time DER-level location and usage data.
Novel solutions to (p.73):
• Automate power flow optimization on the distribution system
• Automate fault detection, isolation, and service restoration
• Coordinate between flexible customers loads and distribution grid assets in real-time
Monitoring by Gridmetrics could be the enabler for the lack of visibility and for all the above “novel solutions.”
1.2 Customer connection interface (p.74):
Current electrical equipment at the customer connection point lacks the capabilities to detect real-time conditions both behind the customer meter and on the local distribution feeder. This limits the potential to optimize load at a customer site within service level constraints and to coordinate with the distribution grid to maximize the value of customer-sided flexible loads. Under the current technology regime, customers also may be required to pay for costly panel, wiring, or service upgrades when electrifying their homes and vehicles.
What are the desired outcomes from R&D? Novel solutions to:
• Monitor localized grid health
Again, Gridmetrics sensors are currently monitoring the grid health, not just outages, so from that perspective the “R&D” is already done. This capability is beyond “grid-ready” it has been ongoing for more than three years.
2. Integrated Grid Planning (reduce waste from unnecessary upgrades) (p.78):
2.1 Underutilized Transmission and Distribution system
Novel technologies to:
• Defer or eliminate the need for new conventional capacity projects
Gridmetrics can identify areas that are subject to frequent voltage changes that can accelerate wear and thus prioritize upgrades to those areas.
2.2 Replacements and Upgrades (p.80):
What is the current state and its primary limitations?
With limited load growth over the past 40 years, T&D infrastructure has typically been replaced due to failure or reaching the end of its useful life. Load growth over the coming decade, however, is expected to increase dramatically. This will require upgrading T&D infrastructure more frequently, much of which will have useful life remaining.
Primary limitations include:
• Lack of sufficient tools to accurately determine remaining useful life of existing assets
Gridmetrics’ ability to monitor voltage changes can inform the utility that equipment may be experiencing accelerated wear due to excessive voltage fluctuations.
3. Wildfires (p.88):
One perhaps non-intuitive area where Gridmetrics sensors could benefit PG&E is for wildfires. In particular, PG&E identifies continuous monitoring as critical and points to these specific issues:
3.1 Continuous monitoring (p.90):
Primary limitations include:
• Lack of scalable solutions for ongoing asset health monitoring
• High costs of deploying continuous monitoring at scale
• Insufficient communications capabilities to provide real-time systemwide connectivity, including the most remote areas of the grid
• Lack of a single, comprehensive device/solutions that could be deployed across the system to detect and locate a wide range of issues (as opposed to a patchwork of technologies targeted at various use cases)
Exploiting Gridmetrics’ huge broadband-based sensor network addresses all of these bullet points. In particular, the cost for deploying is zero because the sensors are already in operation. The “communications capabilities” are assured by the broadband infrastructure. Gridmetrics is a “single, comprehensive device/solution” again assured by the broadband industry that is already deployed across the PG&E (and other utilities) service territory.
3.2 Ignition notification(p.95):
Primary limitations include:
• Gaps in the scope of coverage across all in-scope assets
• Latency in notification times
• Limitations in locational accuracy of alerts critical to dispatching resources to precise locations for response
Gridmetrics sensors provide near real-time (5 minutes) voltage values and highly-accurately known sensor locations.
3.3 Fault location (p.96):
Primary limitations include:
• Ability to precisely identify and communicate the geographic location of faults and incipient faults
• Ability to identify the location of deterioration and faults within assets (e.g., partial discharges) to enable proactive maintenance prior to failure
These limitations are overcome with Gridmetrics voltage monitors and its broadband-based backhaul. While not identifying faults per se, the changes in voltage are quickly and easily identified.
3.4 Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (p.98):
Novel technologies to:
• Enable faster relay response rate of 20 milliseconds or below
Gridmetrics next-generation sensors have a sampling time of 0.1 milliseconds and broadband speeds with low latency.
4. Undergrounding of power lines (p.106):
Undergrounding power lines removes them from environmental effects which can lead to poor power resilience, e.g., blackouts when wildfire conditions are present. Poor power resilience areas, identified through distribution-level monitors from Gridmetrics, may thus be used to identify leading candidates for undergrounding.
5. Summary
Many of the above issues are related to what could be described very generally as “site selection”–whether applied to issues of undergrounding, wildfires, upgrading, grid planning, supply and load management, etc. Gridmetrics can thus be thought of as a utility knife for site selection.
The table below highlights the PG&E interest areas and the current and future Gridmetrics contribution to dealing with these critical areas. Currently, a utility within Gridmetrics’ sensor network could make use of PENS power events as well as using PENS Resilience Indexes for more detailed analysis of voltage behavior. In the future the wide availability of high-frequency sensors will allow extremely detailed analysis and understanding of voltages at the distribution level.
| PG&E Interest Area | Gridmetrics Contribution (via current PENS system and/or 2nd generation sensors) |
| Supply and Load mgt: Lack of real-time data and analytics | 5-minute data for the distribution grid; 2nd generation sensors: 10kHz data for the distribution grid |
| Asset health | Related to power resilience using Gridmetrics PENS Indexes |
| Wildfires: Ignition notification Fault identification | 5-minute data for the distribution grid; 2nd generation sensors: 10kHz data for the distribution grid |
| Grid Planning | Identify areas with poor resilience and reduce unnecessary spending in areas that don’t need it, i.e., better capital allocation |
| Powerline Safety | 20msec response from 0.1msec sensors, implies nearly 200 data points with which to make a decision with small latency |
| Undergrounding power lines | Determined via distribution-level power resilience |
The areas identified in the PG&E R&D Strategy are not unique to PG&E but are widespread throughout the utility space. Gridmetrics’ national-level coverage could inform many utilities and help these utilities to fulfill their increasingly challenging operating environment.
[1] https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/about-pge/environment/what-we-are-doing/innovative-community-programs/PGE-RD-Strategy-Report.pdf
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