Power Systems in a Digital Era
(Room Lehar 3)
19 Jun 18
2:00 PM
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3:30 PM
Tracks:
Track 3: Big Data, Big Opportunity.
The power systems across the world experience a fast change towards the decentralization of generation, integration of renewable generation and involvement of loads in the operation and planning processes. There is a rapid pace of connecting millions of assets to the power system, replacing large and centralized production facilities with distributed and remote generation; bringing in new technologies like power electronics, wind turbines, solar PV, electrical vehicles chargers and batteries. This transition of the power system poses challenges for the grid operators to ensure stability and quality of supply. The amount of interconnected systems increases dramatically, moving from a few tens of large and well dispatchable power plants to millions of distributed assets. There is a need for increased flexibility, while impact of customer behavior and weather has to be well understood. Integrating these new assets in the operational and planning processes of power grids requires: • local integration – new, edge connected devices, consider and obey the local rules of connection to the grid • system integration – new assets need to provide system wide support • market integration – new assets participate in the energy trading and provide services on the electricity markets. The emergence of new technologies such as cloud, big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, fast communications and high power computing is an opportunity for the electricity sector to jump into the digital era and manage the complexity of the future power grids. This paper discusses the current state of the art in grid digitalization and indicates the necessary developments to ensure the future power grids have the even better reliability and efficiency levels. Examples of managing complexity through aggregation, as well as using machine learning to determine asset life times are given to illustrate the use of digitalization in the industry.