Between the Poles: Open distributed intelligence platform for microgrids with solar and battery storage

Geoff Zeiss

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OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
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I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
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BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
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Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« Microgrids forecasted to grow rapidly in next five years primarily in municipalities | Main | Deriving engineering and O&M cost information from "scan to BIM" models »

February 09, 2015

Open distributed intelligence platform for microgrids with solar and battery storage

At DistribuTECH 2015, Duke Energy held a session about their Phase 2 project (COW II) of the Coalition of the Willing initiative.

Stuart Laval, Smart Grid Technology Manager at Duke, presented an overview of the COW II project. At most utilities the current architecture is a collection of proprietary application silos with no field interoperability. What interoperability there is is via the enterprise service bus in the central control office. Duke is proposing a distributed intelligence platform (DIP) with seamless interoperability in the field. Duke's plan is to implement a Common Information Model (CIM) into an OpenFMB field message bus which is based on mature standards - OMG Data Distribution Service and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) which is now an OASIS Standard. CIM provides semantics in the form of standardized object model representations.

The use case is a islandable microgrid. The microgrid will include solar and battery storage and will use wireless to support field communication between all the devices on the distribution grid.

Some of the objectives of the COW II project are

Demonstrate operation of an islandable microgrid utilizing solar PV and battery storage.
Demonstrate a functioning distributed intelligence architecture.
Demonstrate interoperability based on CIM between open publish/subscribe standard protocols including DDS and MQTT.
Develop and demonstrate "edge of the grid" applications such as volt/var and solar smoothing.
Demonstrate live interoperability at DistribuTECH 2016.

Duke has lined up 25 vendor partners to support the COW II effort. For most types of equipment, there are two vendor partners that can provide the equipment. For example, Elster and Itron manufacture smart meters.

A key part of the demonstration is a field message bus based on open standards. Duke is working with a number of partners to support this effort.

Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP)
North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB)
National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) DOE INTEGRATE project
EPRI Integrated Grid program
CPS Energy "Grid of the Future" deployment in San Antonio

The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has already created an OpenFMB working group to support this effort.

Posted at 01:30 PM in Electric Power, Energy storage, Interoperability, Microgrid, Open Standards, Renewable energy, Smart-grid | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

September 2024

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February 09, 2015

Open distributed intelligence platform for microgrids with solar and battery storage

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