Grid Talk - Watt's New in Power | Mar 2024 Edition
Updated: Sep 18
It is time for the second installment of Grid Talk - Watt's New in Power. Before we jump into the deep dive of the month, want to share a quick update from DistribuTECH last month. The week started off with a half day training session on enterprise DERMS implementation by Oracle and some of the industry leading personnel. In the next two and half days, on the exhibition floor, we had over a hundred a folks stop by our booth, which included utility personnel, consulting professionals, product vendor teams and other fellow startup founders. It was truly an invigorating trip that instilled confidence in me that we at Grid Transformation are on the right track. I would also take this opportunity to thank DISTRIBUTECH International for providing us with the opportunity to present our ideas and have a presence at the show even as a startup as part of the Initiate Startup Arena. Finally, I would wholeheartedly thank each and everyone of you who took the time to stop by our booth.
Grid Transformation Inc @ DTech 2024
Two 'OT' roads diverged in a wood...
The title of this month's newsletter is inspired from the poem 'The Road Not Taken' published in 1915 by Robert Frost, a 19th/ 20th century poet (born in San Francisco and led his later life in New England) who wrote this poem to highlight the difficulty of human beings to make decisions and how we should make choices that define us as an individual (in this case as an industry/society). Let's diving into why I think the title is relevant for this newsletter.
Similar to Robert Frost's poem, we are at a crossroads in the electric utility industry where we are seeing an upsurge in the energy consumption via EVs, AI data centers, crypto mining, developing economies moving 100s of millions of out of energy poverty (and general poverty) and we need to make a decision on how we are going to go about providing clean, reliable power to all customers (residential, commercial and industrial alike) while also integrating large volumes of Distributed Energy Resources i.e., DERs (wind, solar, battery storage) along with all other conventional sources of energy into the existing operational technology (OT) architecture that currently exists at electric utilities. My previous blog post talked about what the external players are doing and how the ISOs are getting involved. You can read more on that here.
This proverbial "road" splits into many ways for the electric utility but for this blog post, I will focus on one such path that I think the control room of the future might end up looking like but I am certain that based on geographies and needs and wants of the different stakeholders the path taken will be different.
Before we talk about the future, let me set some context on what has happened in the past 20 or so years and what is happening today and then we can jump into the future state.
Operational Technology Architecture - 2000s & 2010s
The last couple of decades has seen the adoption and implementation of what we in the industry call an ADMS (Advanced Distribution Management System) platform. This started out as an industry term and has evolved over time with what it means for every singly utility and for the software vendors in this space who are developing and delivering them to their clients.
So, you may want to know what is an ADMS and why did we come up with this enterprise platform? The answer is simple, just like every other technological invention, it was to remove redundancy, make the workflow smoother for the end user, move the stakeholders from literal paper printouts to a digital record and streamline efficiency across organizations that used to be siloed into a digitized, integrated and centralized operational technology platform, known as ADMS. (The image below shows an ADMS which is integrated with all the different edge systems) The are 3 major application components within an ADMS, an Outage Management System (OMS), a Distribution Management System (DMS) and Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) with a network model as a foundational layer that all the other 3 application layers are built on. I will not spend too much time on ADMS, that will be for some other day, for folks who are curious to learn about the different challenges within an ADMS system implementation, feel free to check out my ADMS deep dive series on Grid Transformation website here.
Move to ADMS in the 2000s & 2010s
Operational Technology Architecture - 2020s
With the migration to a centralized ADMS platform the control room at the electric utility has been able to leapfrog into the 21st century by moving away from some of the archaic processes that were extremely manual and, in most cases, redundant to what a digital product can do today in 2024. Now, as I had mentioned at the very top, we have seen the massive proliferation of DERs at both the residential level as well at the commercial and industrial level, there is a need to be able to not only view the DER capacity, but based on the customer usage, be able to predict what the load will be for the day ahead, week ahead and even a year out, from a planning perspective as well as ability to provide reliable power to the customers without having to charge them with exorbitant rates. This has resulted in a brand platform being built that can handle all the requirements that I had mentioned above i.e., DER management platforms or DERMS (Distribution Energy Resources Management Systems). The DERMS platform for the most part contains the following components Market Interaction (bidding, settlement and transactive energy), DER Control (Scheduling and dispatch, optimization, VPP, Demand Response and Curtailment), DER Visibility (Forecasting, monitoring, aggregation), DER Device Management (registration, data exchange, asset modeling), Grid Services (VVO, Energy management, Capacity planning, Constraint management, etc.). Today, most if not all the major ADMS software vendors, have their own DERMS modules/platforms available for electric utilities to implement but these platforms are still in the nascent stage of adoption and there are not lot of examples of successful implementations of DERMS platform with all the capabilities in them fully deployed at an electric utility. What we will see is the implementation of these DERMS platforms alongside the existing ADMS platforms and there will be bidirectional data flow between the two systems and in some instances where the software vendor for both applications are the same, they will be sharing a common network model. Apart from the DERMS platform, what we have seen is the adoption of cloud in the OT space for these specific systems, which was not the case previously. Today, there are a significant number of the ADMS implementations that are being deployed on Azure, AWS, or any other cloud platform on their own private cloud instance that can adequately secured to meet the cybersecurity requirements. (The image below shows the move from a monitor and control model to a optimize and dispatch DER along with the other components model)
Integration of DERs via DERMS in the 2020s
Operational Technology Architecture of the future
The above move to add a DERMS platform to the OT architecture and the control room in the utility will take some time and will not happen overnight. Just like the adoption of ADMS platforms, the DERMS adoption will result in an evolution of the DERMS offering by the software vendors, where I do believe that eventually, there will be a single platform that will perform all the functions of monitoring, managing, controlling both physical assets that are under the control of the electric utility like SCADA devices, but will also be used for DER assets that might not be in the direct control of the utility. What we will end up seeing is a mix of both direct connection of DER assets (utility owned and controlled) and connection of DER aggregators (private companies that sign up large number of individual residential and commercial customers) with the utility operating platform, while also working in tight collaboration with the RTO/ISO in a certain region (This is obviously North America specific). The details about DSOs and the various different DSOs models is not going to be discussed in this blog post but please feel free to read more about the why's for a DSO model and the associated challenges on Grid Transformation official company blog -> here. Along with a future state DSO and an integrated ADMS+DERMS platform, what we will see is GenAI and AI agents being deployed within the OT architecture. Both Amazon (AWS Bedrock) and Microsoft (Azure AI) have their own AI models and other industry leading AI models available for purchase on their cloud platforms. In the future, we will see several AI agents developed and deployed that will perform functions in the control room that today is performed by either operators or by the supporting engineers and IT personnel. Time will tell us what the specific use cases will be for these specific agents, but these tools will be inevitable. (The image below shows the future state of the OT architecture with the integration of AI, DERs and DSO model)
Fully integrated ADMS & DERMS as part of a future state DSO model
As I had mentioned at the very beginning, the electric utility industry and more specifically the organization that oversees keeping the lights on i.e., the operations teams and their operational technology landscape is changing at a rapid pace, not just within their own four walls but also more rapidly outside them. It will be fascinating to see where we end up in the next couple of decades as we move towards solving some of the most complex challenges in modern times.
Top Stories from Grid & Tech
Following are the top 10 stories that caught my attention in the last month. I am sure there are more stories out there that I missed out. Please feel free to add your top stories in the comments to this newsletter below!
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-grid-electricity-distribution_ngdso-decarbonisation-netzero-activity-7179163496809418754-9wd7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop - National Grid UK sharing their DSO Strategic Action Plan
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/revolutionizing-grid-planning-age-active-distribution-athanasiadis-ulzof/?trackingId=A1f4HnEU4lP%2FL9pob38bug%3D%3D - NET2GRID and Powerley working on identifying EV loads and different levels of chargers leveraging AI at DTE Energy with access to 1.3 million LV distribution network.
https://www.blg.com/en/insights/2024/03/day-ahead-market-and-other-market-changes-proposed-for-albertas-electricity-system - Alberta market proposed day-ahead and other market changes
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-conditional-loan-commitment-holtec-palisades-nuclear/711498/ - DOE supporting the recommissioning of the 800 MW palisades nuclear power plant.
https://a16z.com/generative-ai-enterprise-2024/ - Andreessen Horowitz report on how generative AI technology is impacting enterprises and where it is going in 2024.
https://theconversation.com/california-is-wrestling-with-electricity-prices-heres-how-to-design-a-system-that-covers-the-cost-of-fixing-the-grid-while-keeping-prices-fair-217073 - California with some of the highest residential electricity prices!
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/google-microsoft-and-nucor-announce-a-new-initiative-to-aggregate-demand-to-scale-the-adoption-of-advanced-clean-electricity-technologies-302092463.html?tc=eml_cleartime - Google and Microsoft looking for advanced clean energy technology to service all the AI data centers that are about to mushroom in the next decade.
https://inflection.ai/the-new-inflection - Big shuffle at Inflection AI (one of the major competitors of OpenAI). The CEO and most of the team moving to Microsoft to be part of Microsoft AI. TLDR! Listen to a few tech focused podcasts and you will know how incestuous the boards and ownership of most of the AI companies!
https://www.power-grid.com/td/transmission/power-across-the-pond-uk-ponders-transatlantic-grid-link-with-us/ - Transatlantic underground transmission lines anyone? I am not saying its a bad idea but this kind of is one of those.
https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin - Worlds first AI software engineer. We are scratching the surface of AI upending our entire workforce as we know it.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/cryptocurrency/btc - Special mention: Bitcoin price for 1 BTC went to about 80k USD. Bringing this up to keep in mind that Crypto/Blockchain is still around and is till guzzling electricity worth some small countries! (I lied again :D, had to sneak in a 11th one this time too.)
"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour..."
Only if the Delorean was available in the market today! :) For folks who know what I am talking about, feel free to comment with the name of the movie. This month’s learnings will continue to revolve around my continued focus on my overall health and what I get to learn with my 3-year-old daughter every day!
If you are looking to do better with your health, then one of the biggest things to focus on would be sleep! Afterall, we do spend one third of our lives sleeping through it. (at least most of us) The following link is from CDC which has some basic tips to improve your sleep. https://sleepeducation.org/healthy-sleep/healthy-sleep-habits/
Gorillas (our evolutionary ancestors) consume roughly 18 kgs/ 40 lbs of plant material every single day! A male gorilla in his prime weighs about 200 kgs/ 440 pounds. Imagine building that kind of body with an all-plant diet. https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/gorilla
One tablespoon of Olive oil contains 13.5 grams of fat!! Now granted is the good kind of fat but if you are looking at your overall macros i.e., fats, protein and carb intake for the day then using spoon full of good oils can also be bad for you. https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/olive-oil?portionid=30460&portionamount=1.000
One that note, I will sign off by thanking all the subscribers of this newsletter (all 700+ of you). For all of you who are celebrating, Happy Easter!! And for the folks who have subscribed and have shown interest, thank you so much!! I will continue to keep bringing content that is both relevant and engaging to all of you (and myself!). My humble request to folks who are subscribing to this newsletter is that if you find it useful/entertaining in anyway, then please feel free repost to your network and engage with me on the newsletter by liking and commenting on the post. As always, feel free to reach out to me here or via email abhinav@grid-transformation.com and follow Grid Transformation to keep up to speed with what we are doing and the latest in the industry as whole.
GridTalk will be back next month. Till then, be safe and stay curious!
Comments