Between the Poles

Revolution in the electric power industry: distributed energy and microgrids

Anne Pramaggiore, President and CEO of ComEd of Chicago, was the first at the Smart Gird Interoperability Panel 2016 Grid Modernization Summit in Washington DC to call the current business transformation that the electric power industry is experiencing a revolution.  But many other speakers agreed with this characterization.  Frequently mentioned were the regulatory and utility business transformations occurring in California and New York (REV).  Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) was mentioned as an example of a utility that was aggressively driving change in the utility business model. 

Robert Wilhite of Navigant Research pointed out that their recent research had found that 90% of utilities recognize that utility business models have to change.  But there are different opinions about the urgency of this transformation.  Navigant found that about half believe that it has to happen immediately, while the remainder believe it can happen later. 

Of course none of this would be possible without the enabling technology of the smart grid.  Dave Velazguez, President and CEO of Pepco, now part of Exelon, recollected that the first smart grid development at Pepco, by no means a laggard in adopting new technology, occurred only a decade ago.

Distributed energy

Virtually every speaker singled out distributed energy (DER), especially solarPV, as the main motivating driver that is forcing the business transformation of the utility industry.   Originally seen as a response to a warming climate, solarPV has achieved grid parity in several parts of the country and is seen as a way of providing customers not only with a choice of a green energy source but increasingly as a less expensive alternative to the local utility.   The price drop has been so substantial that even at a time of unusually low natural gas prices that are responsible for closing many coal-fired generation plants solarPV is achieving grid parity in many parts of North America.  Another important contributor to the revolution is the electrification of transportation, not only EVs but also buses, rail and even trucks.  

But none of this could have happened without the enabling platform of the smart grid.   The conjunction of technological advances in packet switched wired and wireless communications networks, intelligent electronic devices underlies the DER advances that have created choice for customers.  As we have seen previously in other industries such as telecom consumers have grasped the opportunity and are now beginning to drive changes in the energy market.

Microgrids

Another topic that came up repeatedly was microgrids.  Duke Energy has been running microgrid pilot for several years from which emerged the OpenFMB standard with an OpenFMB working group to support the effort. ComEd has five microgrid pilots and is starting the country's first microgrid cluster.  Pepco has two microgrid projects underway.

At the Distributech 2016 and at this SGIP Summit an implementation of OpenFMB demonstrated live by Green Energy Corp.  It was also announced at the summit that the source code was now available for download from the openFMB.io site. 

In addition a number of vendors were offering solutions for managing microgrids including the KEPCO Consortium from Korea who has built a comprehensive microgrid solution.

Geospatial

Although this was not a geospatially-focussed conference, GIS and geospatial technology came up in several areas.

Chanda Visweswanah, an IBM fellow, outlined in three topics what the the challenge is in transforming the grid.  First, there are several trends that are behaving exponentially, the number of sensors, the volume of data, and renewable energy sources were among them.  Secondly, we are increasingly relying on intermittent energy sources like wind and solarPV.  Third, this is not you grandmother's software.  This is software that provides a platform that supports sophisticated mathematical algorithms.  One of the most important of these are algorithms that nowcast and forecast weather at a very high resolution so that it is possible to predict wind velocity not at ground level but at the elevation of the turbines and at the location of the wind farm.  Similarly for insolation for solarPV.  These wind and insolation maps are effectively are the generation forecast minutes and hours in advance.

The Kepco Consortium demonstrated the μ-Grid platform.  Kepco have already partnered with PowerStream in Ontario to provide a utility-scale microgrid.  Earlier this year PowerStream and Kepco officially launched a utility-scaled Microgrid, which has the capacity to provide several hours of backup power supply for approximately 400 customers residing or owning a business in Penetanguishene. The Microgrid is helping to reinforce the existing grid by increasing resiliency and operational flexibility.  The platform provides a GIS Studio which allows grid 35 types of power facilities such as transformers to be visulaized and edited on a map, either imagery form satellites or overflights or a topographic map.

Another application of geloocation is in the area of cybersecurity where location is used by advanced cybersecurity applications for verifying identity.

Distributed intelligence

Several speakers pointed out that the volume of data has simply become to large for a centralized IT system that collects all the data at a central control point where analysis and visualization is performed.  By pushing intelligence out into the field, it reduces the data volumes that have to be handled at the central station and reduces the data flow over the network. 

Standards

Orange Button

Based on the very successful Green Button program, an important standards initiative is Orange Button.  It was initiated by the Department of Energy (DOE) with the objective of making it easier for investment to flow into solar power by standardizing electronic reporting of solar installation performance.  Orange Button targets a reduction in soft costs by streamlining the collection, security, management, exchange, and monetizing of solar datasets across the value chain of solar. It is expected that creating an industry-driven standardized data landscape will facilitate the growth and expansion of distributed solar. As the solar market continues to expand, it is critical that the collection, management, and exchange of solar datasets – especially those that affect the bankability (ability to secure loans for solar installations) of solar assets – are coordinated and streamlined to protect consumers, increase efficient pricing, and support new and existing businesses entering the solar marketplace. In April of this year four awardees (kWh Analytics, National Renewable Energy Laboratory,  Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, and SunSpec Alliance) were announced by the Department of Energy that will collaborate on the overall goal to standardize the way solar data is collected and exchanged.  SGIP was chosen to lead the effort.

At SGIP the effort is being led and coordinated by Dixon Wright of Wells Fargo.  Dixon is the only person that I was aware of representing a financial institution at the SGIP event.  I think that the presence of a major financial player such as Wells Fargo is a strong indication that solar is moving into the big leagues of financing. Dixon is passionate about the Orange Button initiative and believes that once a draft standard and implementation becomes available and a few users champion it, it will catch on rapidly with the large financial institutions and the solar industry.

OpenFMB

In March 2015, the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) formally kicked-off its OpenFMB effort to foster field interoperability drawing upon Duke Energy’s previous Coalition of the Willing I and Distributed Intelligence Platform work. By the 2015 SGIP Annual Conference in November, three microgrid use cases had been developed and demonstrated: optimization, unscheduled islanding, and grid reconnection.

In February 2016, the first OpenFMB reference implementation, utilizing SGIP’s microgrid use cases at Duke Energy’s Mount Holly microgrid test center, was demonstrated at the 2016 DistribuTECH Conference by Duke Energy’s Coalition of the Willing II (COW-II) vendor partners. For the annual SGIP Grid Modernization Summit in November 2016 the SGIP OpenFMB task force published a series of related foundational use cases that center on Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Circuit Segment Management for the active coordination of power systems equipment to DER, including a microgrid.  Green Energ Corp demonstrated an OpenFMB implementation connecting a solar PV installation with other equipment and applications.   This is an open source project and it was announced at the SGIP event that the source code is now available and can be downloaded from openfmb.io.  There is a free webinar replay "SGIP Grid Modernization Summit OpenFMB Demo Preview."  

Interoperability

Several speakers were on hand from the Department of Energy's Gris Modernization labs.  Since this was an SGIP event they focussed on the research underway at 13 Federal labs and 150 partner organizations that involves interoperability.  First of all research is underway to find a way to measure interoperability.  Secondly, there is an important initiative underwritten by several million dollars of financing to determine how to value interoperability.  If we can quantify the contribution it makes to business efficiencies by enhancing the opportunity for competitve products, by creating standards-based platforms that intelligent products from different vendors, whether smart meters, synchrophasors, reclosers, or substation components can plug and play with, that ultimately reduces prices for utilities, then it will be easier to justify and priorize greater investment  the standards and implementations that provide interoperability.

Future Of Utilities: Ontario energy regulator changing how the power grid is priced

Don't underestimate how easily a regulated industry can be disrupted by a little technology and a better price.  Referencing Uber and the regulated taxi industry, that was one of the key messages that Peter Fraser, Vice President, Industry Operations and Performance, Ontario Energy Board (OEB), left his audience with at the Future of Canada's Utilities Summit in Toronto.  Those are strong words from a senior executive at the organization responsible for regulating the electric power and natural gas industries in Ontario, a province with ten million people and the largest economy in Canada.

He went on to say that the electricity sector in Ontario is undergoing a profound change, an even bigger change than the introduction of the wholesale electricity market in the 1990s. He mentioned low carbon economy, new technologies to generate, transmit and distribute electricity, and the changing needs of their customers as the major drivers of this change that will reshape utilities.  He said that regulators such as the OEB need to adapt regulation to this new world, including the way electricity is priced.  Electricity needs to be priced in a way that increases system efficiency, gives customers the control they want including greener energy, and encourages innovation in an industry that has traditionally been focused on keeping the lights on with 100 year old technology.

New technology that is driving change includes solar PV, smart meters and other smart devices, and electric power storage.  But the “secret sauce” behind all of this is the penetration of modern communications technologies such as wireless and packet switched networks into the electric power grid.  Together these technologies are enabling microgrids, which Peter sees as an important part of the future for utilities.

Consumers, whose relationship with their power utility in the past has been a monthly bill, now expect  a much more complex relationship with their utility.  They expect to sell power to the utility, want to install their own power technology, want less fossil fuel generated power and will most likely use less power from the utility.   Distributed renewable generation and a non-traditional demand curve are directly impacting utility revenue and forcing a change in the utility business model.  Nearly every speaker at the event referred to the "duck curve" (graphic from CAISO) which shows demand dropping during the day as a result of customers generating their own power during the day, but which represents falling revenues for utilities who continue the traditional utility business model of selling electricity.

To begin to address the changing landscape of power generation and demand, the OEB has several  initiatives underway. A OEB report released last November concluded that the Regulated Price Plan (RPP) in Ontario had been moderately effective in shifting residential load, but ineffective in shifting small business load.  In response to the report the OEB is laying out a five-point plan to be implemented over the course of the next 3 to 5 years. The OEB intends to redesign the RPP roadmap to respond to policy objectives, improve system efficiency, and give consumers greater control. The five components of the new RPP roadmap are focussed on renewing the RPP objectives, empowering consumers by enhancing energy literacy and non-price tools, implementing price pilots, engaging with small business consumers, and working with government to reduce barriers.

The OEB will roll-out new price plans beginning in 12 months.  The new RPP will reflect that distribution systems will have to change to accommodate more power coming from customers, that the demand for power demand for power is falling, but that the costs of utilities in maintaining the grid need to be covered.

What this will be mean for residential customers in Ontario is a fixed monthly charge for distribution services. This is similar to what other utilities such as Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) are doing.  For commercial and industrial customers the price of electric power will be determined by peak consumption, but price signals will allow customers to choose to shift their load to off-peak times.  This potentially will be a win-win situation where customers reduce their electric bill and the utility benefits from a reduced peak load.  The new price plan will also aim to encourage innovation.  One of the areas where the OEB sees innovation occurring is behind the meter, where microgrids are expected to proliferate in the future.

As I have blogged about before, in the new world of electric power sometimes referred to as Grid 3.0, location will play a strategic role, as an essential component of "nowcasting" generation from intermittent sources such as solar and wind as well as increasingly granular demand estimation.  It also provides the foundation for integrating data from smart devices, operational systems, and external data sources for real-time situational assessment.

In Ontario nearly all electricity customers have smart meters.  Ontario is unique in North America in that all of the usage data from smart meters for the entire province, about 4.9 million residential and small business consumers, are stored in a central repository called the Smart Meter Entity (SME).  To date little has been done to take advantage of this valuable repository of electricity usage data.  The current database lacks some important information that would help make this data more useful.  For example, currently it can't distinguish between residential and small business customers and it lacks location information.  The OEB has asked the SME to collect postal code, type of consumer, and some other useful information.  It also is being asked to anonymize that data so that it can be made available to third parties.

Attracting young people especially digital natives to the electric power has been challenging because in the past the power industry was not perceived as an exciting industry to be involved in.  That is changing.  Not only has new technology, especially digital technology, made electric power one of the most rapidly changing and exciting industries to be in, but it also means that utility employees are becoming agents of change with the potential to deliver social good.  Power employees once again will be the good guys, as they were 100 years ago.

It looks like big changes are coming to the Ontario energy retail market, and they may be coming sooner that we expect.

For the future of distributed energy watch the Hawaiian power utilities

Keep a close watch on the Hawaiian power utilities (HECO) because Hawaii has committed to 100% renewables by 2045 and 65% by 2030. That was the recommendation of Sharon Allan, CEO of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) at a DistribuTECH2016 MegaSession on distributed energy resources (DER) in response to a question from the audience asking what should utilities do to get ready for GRID 3.0.

Hawaii already has 487 MW of solar PV capacity, 90% of which is residential rooftop panels. At  DistribuTECH2016, Talin Sakugawa from HECO and Matthew Shawver from in2lytics gave an insightful presentation on distributed energy generation (DER), big data and analytics at the Hawaiian power utility.  Hawaii has seen an exponential rise in rooftop solar PV. As a result since 2010 the utility has been experiencing a reduction in net load and revenue. The most dramatic drop in load is during daytime hours as is readily apparent by comparing the utility's load on clear and cloudy days which reflects the impact of residential solar PV.

Challenges facing utilities

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has published  an analysis of the economics of leaving the grid.  The central thesis is that solar PV and electricity storage enables consumers to leave the grid completely.  Solar PV has already reached grid parity in about 10% of the U.S. and declining PV prices suggest that this trend will continue.  However, without the ability to store electric power, consumers with rooftop PV still require the grid for nights and cloudy days.  The development of combined solar PV and batteries from Tesla and others promises to make solar + storage accessible for increasing numbers of consumers.  These consumers could form their own microgrid, either by themselves or with their neighbours and disconnect from the grid.  Alternatively they could become a source of dispatchable power and become an energy provider.  Increasingly they could find that either of these options is economically advantageous.  This has serious implications for local utilities because if this trend develops it will seriously erode the traditional utility revenue base.   It could also lead to a completely decentralized grid comprised of many microgrids.  From an operations perspective it increases the complexity of managing the grid compared to the centralized model in use today.

The other challenge for a utility with a high penetration of intermittent, distributed generation (DER) is load balancing, ensuring that generation meets demand. The German power industry, the U.S. Department of Energy, Hawaiian power utilities,  California power utilities, ERCOT, and many others are working to address this challenge.  HECO's presentation at DistribuTECH gave an insightful overview of what they are doing to meet this technical challenge.

Data sources

HECO collects a large amount of data from diverse sources. It is comprised of internal operational data plus data from esternal sources. It includes weather forecasts, data from customer sited PV, consumer/public resource data, phasor (PMU) data, renewables power quality, feeder data, irradiance meters, generator and substations power quality, SCADA, and vendor data such as forecasts and data from Independent Power Producers (IPPs). The data has widely different time resolutions ranging from real time such as PMUs sampling 30 times per second, SCADA reporting every 2 seconds, calculated gross load every 2 seconds, PV inverter data reporting every 5 minutes and aggregated monthly, weather forecast reporting every 15 minutes and aggregated daily, transformers collecting data every 15 mins and aggregated monthly, and smart meters reporting every 15 minutes and aggregated quarterly. Much of the data includes location. The data comes in different formats and has different levels of quality.

Fundamental to distributed energy are weather maps.  Maps of irradiance and wind velocity can be directly used to estimate or predict solar and wind generation in different parts of the islands.  Temperature maps are also important because the efficiency of solar panels depends on temperature.  The more accurate the weather forecasts are, the more predictable the generation.  Knowing that there it will be cloudy over the south of Oahu, but sunny over the rest of the island, or cloudy over the whole island, but with moderate to strong winds allows operations to estimate how much backup generation is required and where. 

EMS Integration

Data from new sources relating to distributed renewable generation are integrated with traditional sources in a distributed energy management system which enables operations and planning visibility into how distributed generation is impacting thte grid. It not only provides a view into the status of the grid (situational awareness) but also allows simulations to assess the impact of different future renewable generation scenarios on the grid. This helps to determine where backup generation may be required because high demand and low generation from renewables or curtailment when there is excess generation and insufficient load.  Location is fundamental to the analytics, because wind and irradiance varies widely over the islands.

Traditional input sources include SCADA and data from transmission, generators, protection, and so on. The new input data sources include GIS-based infrastructure models and data from the distributed generation sources. Also new is weather forecasting which enables predicting generation from renewable sources.  It also includes historical and actual weather reports, and satellite and other weather data.

HECO uses an IT platform from In2lytics (a spinoff from Referentia) which integrates all of these time series data with EMS, SCADA, CIS, and GIS and makes it available to operational users, planners, modelers and the public. in2lytics is a high performance time series database that is specially designed to provide instant data accessibility for planning and operational decision making.  in2lytics enables load, query, analysis using MATLAB, and sharing of the "big data" required to monitor and manage today’s complex electric grid. in2lytics has native high performance interfaces for MATLAB in addition to programming languages.  It translates data from different sources into its internal time series database. All data is archived in a spatially enabled time series database for future analysis. Matthew said that in2lytics is able to analyze large volumes of historical time series data very rapidly. For example, a longitudinal analysis on two years worth of archived data can be run in an hour or two.

Applications

Accounting for renewables requires a lot of data. Some areas that use this data include generation planning, load forecasting, distribution planning, and contract administration. One of the first applications is a customer facing web site called Renewable Watch - Oahu that reports the total renewables generation, solar and wind, on Oahu in real-time.

An example of an application that will be used for contract administration beginning next month estimates how much power is lost from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) in the case of curtailment. It uses weather information to estimate wind speed and irradiance meters to estimate wind and solar generation potential.

Another analytical application was used to study how solar PV variability affects transformer tap changes. This application allows HECO to relate frequency of tap changes to solar PV variability and to determine which transformers are most affected by solar variability.

HECO has a number of projects with the Department of Energy and other partners.

1. Department of Energy's Integrating System to Edge-of-Network Architecture and Management" (SEAMS) A federally-funded research initiative on high penetration grids which aims to streamline grid planning and operations for utilities in regions with high concentrations of distributed generation (DG) resources.

2. Department of Energy's Distributed Resource Energy Analysis and Management System (DREAMS) Department of Energy system to provide useful information about the distributed grid to grid operators.

   Partners: Siemens, Alstom, DNV, AWS Truepower, Referentia, Sunshot

   Advisory Team:SMUD, Southern California Edison, California ISO, TEP, APS, Kaua'i Island Utility Cooperative, Western APA

3. Making sense of synchrophasor data for utilities. The Synchrophasor Visual Integration and Event Evaluation for Utilities (SynchroVIEEU) with High Penetrations of Renewables. Accelerate the integration of synchrophasor information into production grade data visualization and analysis platforms/models. Leverage PMU capability at many substations – explore ways to tap resources and provide real-time visibility and real-time data. Make synchrophasor data accessible for efficient and reliable operations of a modern grid in light of high penetrations of renewable resources

   Partners: SEL, DNV GL, Referentia

4. Monitoring, planning, and modeling high PV penetration microgrid. Decision support for microgrid design and operation at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has launched an ambitious program to demonstrate and evaluate energy technologies using Navy and Marine Corps facilities as test beds, known as the Energy Systems Technology and Evaluation Program (ESTEP). Program management is being handled by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific). ESTEP was established in 2013. It brings together the Department of the Navy, academia, and private industry to investigate and test emerging energy technologies at Navy and Marine Corps installations. At present, ESTEP conducts over 20 in-house government energy projects, ranging from energy management to alternative energy and storage technologies.

Other projects include

• Remote light sensor technology at the Kahuku wind farm on Oahu to measure and forecast windspeed and direction to support reliability;
• Sonic detection and ranging technology to remotely measure wind speed and direction;
• Network of solar irradiance sensors to measure light and to make forecasts;
• EV Race to the Sun, a joint Japan-U.S. showcase event for electric vehicles,to take place on Haleakala;
• Battery storage technology development, including the JUMPSmartMaui project.

The ultimate objective for HECO is to become a company offering diversified services providing value to engaged customers, of course with satisfied regulators and sustainable costs and margins.  

Big data and spatial-temporal analytics

It was clear from this presentation that essential for HECO, or to any utility, with a high penetration of solar or wind are weather maps, forecasted, actual and historical because these enable the utility to project generation. The also allow utilities to analyze the historical record in conjunction with other data to discover trends that may help improve forecasting.  Collecting and analyzing temporal geospatial data is fundamental for distributed energy management.  This is in addition to the expanded application of geospatial technology for utility operations and planning in the smart grid era.

Powering up the smart grid with geospatial technology

The electricity industry is undergoing a transformation. With utilities embracing geospatial technology and turning into data driven enterprises in the Smart Grid scenario, the sector is staring at an innovative future.

The National Academy of Engineering identifies the electric power grid as the first of 20 major engineering achievements that has had the greatest impact on the quality of life in the 20th Century. Modern society has reached a point where virtually every crucial economic and social function depends on the secure, reliable operation of electric power infrastructure.  But because it has become so crucial for modern life, it faces major challenges.
   
The major drivers for the fundamental change underway in the electric power industry are increasing demand, universal access, decarbonizing electric power, reducing revenue losses, and grid reliability and resilience.  Some of the  technologies that are contributing to this transformation are intelligent devices integrated with a communications network, distributed renewable power generation especially wind and solar PV, net zero energy buildings, microgrids, and the new remote sensing technologies of subsurface utility engineering.  

For an industry not known historically for rapid change, many utilities are in the midst of transforming themselves into data driven enterprises. Recently IDC published its future predictions for the development of the electric power industry over the period 2015-2018.  For many in the industry these are quite startling and clearly reflect an industry that is rapidly evolving.

The technology roadmap for the smart grid involves the deployment of increasing numbers of intelligent electronic devices for sensing and for control.  The challenge is federating the data from all of these devices, extracting information from it, and dispatching the information to the right control devices. 
 
With the changes that the electric power industry is undergoing now, analysts see geospatial technology poised to become a foundation technology for the smart grid.  The role of utility GIS is expected to touch every aspect of a utilities business, affecting customers, operations and management because geospatial is the logical technology that can provide  the basis for integrating data from intelligent electronic devices such as smart meters and the  information silos associated with proprietary applications.

You can read more about smart grid and relevance of geospatial data and technology, real-time big spatial data, standards for interoperability, the importance of data quality, open source geospatial technology,  spatial analytics and other aspects of the role of geospatial technology in the smart grid in Geospatial World.

Changing the world's energy economy: Elon Musk announces Tesla Energy

At the beginning of May Elon Musk gave a presentation is which he offered his vision of an alternative to fossil fuels as the future of humanity's energy sourcing and delivery.  Musk's long term objective is global carbon free energy for power generation and transportation.  He announced Tesla Energy and its first products, lithium-based Powerwall consumer (10 kWh) and Powerpack utility-scale (100 kWh) batteries.  He also discussed a third product, GigaFactory, which he described as a gigantic machine to manufacture Powerwall and Powerpack batteries. 

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur with a vision for humanity.  He is the chairman of SolarCity and his vision for practical carbon-free energy helped start the company.  SolarCity has already had significant transformative impact on the traditional power utility business model.  He is also the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, a manufacturer of electric vehicles and batteries. (He is also CEO of Space-X, but that's another discussion.)  Musk is proposing a fundamental transformation of how the world works, by developing an alternative model for how energy is sourced and delivered.  He believes it is possible with solar and batteries to wean the world off fossil fuels and reduce  anthropogenic CO₂ emissions to near-zero.

The Problem

The world's electric power and transportation is powered by burning fossil fuels. The result is that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions have pushed atmospheric CO2 concentrations (first recorded by climate scientist Charles Keeling) to levels not seen even in the paleoclimate record.

The Solution

Musk thinks that collectively we should do something about this, but is has to be practical (and not win the Darwin award). His proposal for a solution has two parts.

1. Solar
Musk pointed out that we have this "handy fusion reactor in the sky" in the sun.  We don't have to do anything except harvest the energy.  Musk calculated the total surface area needed to generate enough power to get the U.S. completely off fossil fuel power generation.   Shown as a blue square on Musk's slide it covers less than 1/4 of  the Texas panhandle.

2. Batteries
The obvious problem with solar energy is that the sun does not shine at night and even during the day the the power generated varies.  Energy captured from the sun needs to be stored.  Battery technology has evolved to the point where the size of the batteries needed to wean the U.S. power generation off fossil fuels is the size of a pixel ("the red pixel") on Musk's slide.

In Musk's view what is needed is a battery that simply works.  A battery that doesn't require a lot of space, is reliable, works with existing home electrical networks and solar installations, is safe, can be used for years and is affordable. The Tesla Energy consumer battery, the Powerwall, is wall-mounted and comes in different colours so you don't need a battery room.  It stores either 7 kWh (priced at $3000) or 10 kWh ($3500) and can be stacked for up to 90 kWh.  To put this in context the average Ontario homeowner uses about 800 kWh a month in energy which translates to an average of 27 kWh a day.  The Powerwall comes with a 10 year warranty.

What it gives you is peace of mind. You don't have to worry about being without power after an ice storm.  It also gives consumers energy independence.  Together with solar panels with these batteries consumers can go completely off the grid.  This presents a huge challenge to the traditional electric power utility business model, comparable to the impact of cell phones on traditional land-line telephone companies.

Powerwall is targetted for homes and small commercial sites.  You can order the Powerwall right now on the Tesla web site.  Musk said that shipping will start in 3 to 4 months.  Initially the rampup will be slow because the batteries will be made in Tesla's Freemont, California factory.  But next year the rampup will accelerate as Tesla transitions to its Nevada Gigafactory.

Tesla is not the only company producing this type of battery.  Aquion Energy and Iron Edison are also also producing consumer-scale power batteries.  You can see how Tesla's Powerwall and these other companies' products compare from a financial perspective here.

Powering remote locations

Battery power is even more crucial for people in remote locations where there is no grid (remote parts of India and Africa), electricity is intermittent (many urban areas in India), or extremely expensive (northern Canada).  Musk thinks that the Tesla Powerwall can scale globally.  What he expects to see is what happened with cell phones and landlines.  The cellphone leapfrogged the landline.  There wasn't any longer a need to put landlines in remote locations. People on islands or remote locations can install solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls and never have to worry about electicity lines.

Utility-scale battery storage

The Tesla Powerpack (100 kWh), which is designed to scale infinitely, can provides gigawatt power.  According to Musk Tesla Energy is already working with a utility on a 250 mWh Powerpack installation. 

Emphasizing that the Powerpack is a reality, Musk announced that the entire evening event had been powered by Powerpack batteries that had been charged by the solar panels on the roof of the building where the event was taking place.  The entire evening was powered by stored sunlight.

Tesla's competitors in this market include Eos Aurora and Imergy Flow.  You can see how Tesla's Powerpack and other companies' products compare financially here.

The big picture: transitioning the world to sustainable energy

Musk calculated that 900 million Powerpacks would be required to transition the world to renewable electric power (90,000 GWh).  To transition the world to renewable electric power and electric powered transportation would require 2 billion Powerpacks.

Musk made the case that this is something that humanity is capable of by looking at what humanity has already done with transportation.  There are about 2 billion cars and trucks on the road.  About 100 million cars and trucks are produced every year so that the world's transport fleet gets refreshed every 20 years.  Musk's argumemnt is that if we can do it with vehicles, it is within our power to do it with batteries.

This is the reason that Tesla's approach in developing the Gigafactory is to treat it as a product. They are designing a giant machine for making batteries.  Musk foresees that there needs to be many gigafactories in the future. He emphasized that this is not something that Tesla is going to do alone.  Many other companies need to develop their own gigafactories. 

Musk also announced that Tesla's policy of open sourcing patents will continue for gigafactories, Powerwalls, Powerpacks, and other technologies.Musk foresees with this technology a future where the Keeling curve will flatten and where there will be no incremental anthropogenic CO2 increase.  The path that he has described based on solar panels and  batteries is the only path that he knows can achieve this.  In his view  it is something that we must do, that we can do, and that we will do.  I have to agree with Ed Parsons.  This is on the level of Steve Jobs revolutionizing consumer electronics and commercial music delivery, but working on the "slightly bigger challenges" of carbon-free transportation and power generation.

Microgrid technology might have prevented the Fukushima Daiichi disaster

As readers of this blog might remember, I began following the Fukushima Daiichi and Daiini events as they unfolded starting on March 11, 2011.  The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi occurred because of the lack of external power to the plant to keep cooling processes operating.  While external power was restored to Fukushima Daiini within hours preventing a major disaster at that plant, it took weeks to restore external power to Fukushima Daiichi. 

Microgrids might be a way to help prevent this kind of disaster in the future.  Navigant Research has just released a report on what it calls  Community Resilience Microgrids (CRMs) which  Navigant defines as microgrids that  provide emergency power services to communities rather than private sector end users, national security critical infrastructure assets such as military bases, or for overall grid reliability.  The focus in the Navigant report is on microgrids for resilence and community.  Another differentiator is that the CRM segment is being stimulated by specific government programs that are providing funding and regulatory support.  The Navigant research is centered on recent programs and projects specifically linked to resilience in communities in light of recent natural and man-made disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in the United States and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan.

CRMs are an interesting segment of the microgrid market.  Navigant's perspective is that CRMs represents an emerging market opportunity, but  that there are important challenges including regulatory inhibitors and an uncertain business model.  Communities are interested in CRMs because for energy resilience they represent an alternative to their local utility.  Utilities may perceive CRMs as a threat because they  potentially could mean losing customers and revenue.

Navigant forecasts that the CRM "implementation revenue", which will amount to about $160 million in 2015, will reach $1.4 billion by 2024. The United States currently leads in terms of policy and technology innovation, but Navigant projects that the Asia Pacific region will become the largest market share due to government programs in place in Japan and China. By 2024 Asia Pacific is projected to be roughly half of the total CRM market.

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.

Microgrids forecasted to grow rapidly in next five years primarily in municipalities

At DistribuTECH 2015, if there was one technology that seemed to be ubiquitous and on almost every utility's radar, it is microgrids.  For example, Duke Energy is seriously considering offering microgrids as a service and Siemens announced that its advanced distribution management software (ADMS) for utilities has been extended to support microgrids.

Existing microgrids are running primarily at military bases (32%) and universities and research labs (24%).  A recent report from GTM Research North American Microgrids 2014: The Evolution of Localized Energy Optimization projects that American microgrid capacity will nearly double over the next three years. Microgrids for critical infrastructure (schools, hospitals, universities, wastewater treatment plants), mainly in cities and small communities, is projected to grow fastest by number of projects in the next five years, driven by government environmental policy.

Microgrids are currently mostly combined heat and power systems.  In the future they will be able to integrate renewable energy and distribution networks assets. For example,

• CPS Energy is assembling a test facility for a three year smart grid testing program.  It will have 30,000 customers, 15 circuits, solar generation, smart inverters, battery storage and the ability to disconnect from the grid to form a microgrid.
• Duke Energy has announced the next phase of their interoperability project COW II which will be a microgrid system which will integrate distributed renewable resources such as solar PV and battery storage with a field message bus-based distributed intelligence platform with wireless communications to a variety of distribution system devices.

An open distributed architecture for the smart grid based on seamless interoperability

At DistribuTECH 2015, Raiford Smith of CPS Energy and Jason P. Handley of Duke Energy, presented their perspectives on the smart grid; what is motivating it in terms of business and technology drivers, a roadmap for implementing it at their utilities, and the benefits that are expected from it for customers and for utilities.  They also outlined a smart grid architecture based on open standards to enable seamless interoperability that enables distributed as opposed to centralized intelligence.  Some of the advantages of a distributed architecture are scalability, reduced latency and implementing security at the grid edge instead of via the central control application.

Megatrends driving smart grid

Raiford Smith sees four major megatrends that are major motivating forces behind the smart grid.  Moore's Law means there are intelligent devices for power networks with greater capabilities and at less cost.  Metcalfe's Law means more interconnections and greater interoperability.  Big data analytics means the ability to extract more meaningful information and insights from rapidly increasing volumes of data coming from thousands and even millions of intelligent devices.  Distributed energy generation (DER) means more complicated power management - balancing intermittent generation and new load profiles from an increasing number of new electronic devices. 

From a business perspective a major benefit is greater customer choice.  In the future the customer will be able to not only manage his/her consumption of power, but also its generation. With rooftop solar PV and batteries the customer may elect to not even be on the grid, but to create his/her own microgrid.   But it also means the utility business model will have to evolve from what it has been for the past 100 years.  New York is one of the jurisdictions that is already changing its regulatory framework to enable utilities to move to a new business model.

Microgrids

As an aside, at this year's DistribuTECH if there was one technology that seemed to be everywhere and on almost every utility's radar, it is microgrids.  Duke Energy is even playing with the idea of offering  microgrids as a service.

Technology roadmap for the smart grid

From Raiford Smith's perspective the technology roadmap for the smart grid involves the deployment of increasing numbers of intelligent electronic devices for sensing and for control.  The challenge is federating the data from all of these devices, extracting information from it, and dispatching the information to the right control devices.  From an architectural perspective this drives the need for a field message bus which enables interoperability between different devices from different vendors.  It also requires a common semantic model, such as the Common Information Model (CIM), adding security at the edge of the grid in addition to the central control room, and analytics to extract information from the huge volume of data collected from the sensors.

To test different smart grid configurations, CPS Energy is assembling a test facility for a three year smart grid testing program.  It will have 30,000 customers, 15 circuits, solar generation, smart inverters, battery storage and the ability to disconnect from the grid to form a microgrid.

Benefits of the smart grid

Raiford expects major benefits for customers and for the utility from implementing a smart grid.  For customers, perhaps the biggest benefit is that the smart grid avoids divergence of utility services and customers needs.  Sometimes referred to as disaggregation, in this context it means a 3rd party coming between a utility and its customers. Historical examples are Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter which were perceived as threats because utilities found the idea of a Microsoft or Google insinuating itself between the utility and its customers unattractive. Opower is an example of a different approach that is much more attractive to utilities.  Instead of doing an end-run around the utility,  Opower focussed on the utility as their direct customer.  Services using Opower's solutions is then offered by the utility to its customers.

Secondly, smart grid provides a flexible foundation for providing new services to customers (which also creates new sources of revenue for utilities).  Raiford suggested some examples including electric vehicles and charging, premium (high quality) power, premium reliability, and asset control (for ex, inverters and batteries) and advanced demand response (the utility would provide these as a service to customers, rather than customers buying these devices from a 3rd party). The result is greater customer satisfaction and improved brand recognition as CPS Energy is perceived as a leader in providing new and improved services to customers.

The benefits that Raiford sees for utilities are equally important.  They include improved operational metrics (SAIDI, SAIFI, asset utilization), better financial metrics (O&M spend, revenue generation), environmental benefits, improved safety, better trained and skilled staff, and more reliable risk modeling (better predictions of revenue, costs, customer satisfaction, and asset condition).

Probably the greatest challenge Raiford sees is managing organizational change, because the smart grid will mean that just about everything will change including the utility business model and most aspects of how we design, build, maintain and operate the grid. 

Drivers for utility industry change

Jason Handley, of the Emerging Technology Office at Duke Energy, reviewed some of the major drivers for industry change.  Many applications currently used by power utilities are proprietary, with the result that the utility has many application silos that don't interoperate.  The rapid adoption of DERs is requiring utilities to move toward faster response times, reduced costs, better safety, and improved reliability.  Dynamic load management and low voltage power electronics will mean greater adoption of rooftop PVs and other DERs.  Increasingly utilities will invest in standards-based, modular systems for hardware, multi-function devices, and a field message bus for software that will enable interoperability.  From a business perspective broader interoperability facilitates more competition which lowers costs, encourages innovation and improves reliability.

Other important drivers that Jason sees that are impacting utilities include demand response, electric vehicles, in-premise automation, cybersecurity threats, aging infrastructure, big data complexity, and avoiding stranded assets.  The smart grid is requiring utilities to change how they do things.  Utilities realize they have to be  more proactive in their operations, rather than waiting for something to happen and then reacting to it.  Situational awareness has become a critical capability for utilities in enabling utilities to be more proactive.  It is made possible by having a variety of sensors in the field that together can present a snapshot of the status of the grid.  The key functionality required to enable this to happen is seamless interoperability.

Centralized or distributed intelligence

As utilities implement thousands and even millions of smart devices in the field, a centralized architecture runs into scalability and latency problems.  Duke's solution is an architecture with distributed as opposed to centralized intelligence.  Duke sees this as comprised of layers so that with this architecture, not all data needs to go to the central control application.  Some can be handled at lower levels.  A self healing network is an example where a problem can be handled locally without the central control application knowing anything about it.  Distributed intelligence also enables fast edge decisions that can be made without waiting for the central control application.  For example, an advantage that cannot be underestimated with this architecture is that it enables security at the edge of the grid, not just via the central control application.  Based on this concept Duke has defined a Distributed Intelligence Platform (DIP) Reference Architecture designed to take advantage of the tremendous intelligence that is out in the field in addition to the intelligence in the control centre.

Duke Energy, CPS Energy and 25 vendors, called the Coalition of the Willing (COW) have just embarked on an implementation of this architecture that supports a microgrid.  The smart grid requires exchanging data between different devices from different manufacturers in the field.  Traditional utility technologies are very often vendor silos utilizing proprietary hardware, telecommunications and software platforms.  The goal of the “Coalition of the Willing" (COW) is to demonstrate that data  and control commands can be shared across multiple vendor platforms (typically proprietary) to achieve interoperability with lower costs and faster response times.  A key part of the demonstration is an open standard field message bus implemented as an open source project.  The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has created an OpenFMB working group to support this effort.

SGIP announces OpenFMB project for open standards-based interoperability platform for utilities

At DistribuTECH 2015 the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has announced the launch of the OpenFMB Project, a special SGIP working group designed to leverage existing standards and structured processes to create a new paradigm for true interoperability and peer-to-peer communication across vendors' architecture that will increase business intelligence and operational efficiencies while allowing for secure and reliable communication and fast decision-making in the field.

The smart grid requires exchanging data between different devices from different manufacturers in the field.  Traditional utility technologies are very often vendor silos utilizing proprietary hardware, telecommunications and software platforms.  Duke Energy and six vendor companies formed a group called the “Coalition of the Willing” (COW) whose goal was to demonstrate that data  and control commands can be shared across multiple vendor platforms (typically proprietary) to achieve interoperability with lower costs and faster response times.  A key part of the demonstration was an open field message bus implemented as an open source project.

Duke Energy has announced the next phase of their interoperability project (COW II) with an expanded group of 25 vendor partners and a utility partner CPS Energy. The second phase will include the operation of a microgrid system which will integrate distributed renewable resources such as solar PV and battery storage with a field message bus-based distributed intelligence platform with wireless communications to devices. 

For COW II Duke Energy defined a Distributed Intelligence Platform (DIP) Reference Architecture.  According to Duke, the reference architecture is intended to document Duke Energy’s technology roadmap for interoperability using open standards-based distributed information systems.  Part of the reference architecture is a field message bus.  According to Duke the Field Message Bus (FMB) is intended to be an open standard-based, common logical publish/ subscribe interface that connects multiple disparate grid devices, telecom networks, and information systems. It is the key technology enabler to demonstrate the benefits of the distributed architecture by facilitating interoperability between multiple different vendor’s OT, IT, and telecom systems.

Starting with the  Distributed Intelligence Platform reference architecture from the COW project, SGIP has defined the OpenFMB concept as the way distributed applications and open interfaces can enable interoperable peer-to-peer data exchanges between power systems devices. The OpenFMB framework provides a specification for power systems field devices to leverage a non-proprietary and standards-based reference architecture platform, which consists of internet protocol (IP) networking, Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocols, and standardized common semantic models (such as CIM), to enable  communications and peer-to-peer information exchange between devices on the electric grid.