Crawl, walk, run, fly: keep moving toward a renewable, resilient grid

“If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  

In the 60+ years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered these words during his speech at Spelman College, his inspirational quote has morphed into a condensed version often quoted in business realms: crawl, walk, run (fly tends to get dropped—whether it’s too aspirational or doesn’t fit with our preference for trifectas, who can say). While the word sequence has been reversed to reflect the natural order of things, the overall intent of “keep moving” has not been lost. 

In a world where the relentless pursuit of progress can be exhausting, we should take comfort knowing that even incremental progress counts, especially when you’re heading into uncharted territory. This is certainly true when it comes to evolving our electric grid to accommodate more renewables and become more resilient. “Accelerating the transition…” is a phrase often associated with the electrification of everything movement, but sometimes a less aggressive approach can be equally effective. And as recently witnessed with India’s first moon landing, slow and steady can—and often does—win the race. 

When it comes to grid resiliency and increasing hosting capacity for more renewables, slow and steady can win here, too. The important thing is for utilities and grid operators to continue taking steps in the right direction. Using crawl, walk, run, fly, here are four phases that keep us moving toward sustainable power grids with increasing amounts of renewable and distributed energy resources. 

Crawl 

Get visibility of everything on your network. Utilities and aggregators need to see all the distributed energy resources (DERs) located behind the meter. Software that communicates over the internet directly with DERs or via a gateway device offers utilities and aggregators this visibility. Cloud-native solutions with robust security protocols can reduce the burden on utilities and aggregators to build out expensive centralized command centers and facilitate visibility from anywhere with a web browser and an internet connection.  

Get appropriate and accurate DER data: The right kind of data is critical to utility and aggregators’ planning efforts. At a minimum, data for each DER should include the following at increments of every five minutes or less:  

• Physical address of DER 
• Which substation, feeder and transformer the DER belongs to 
• DER type 
• Supported control modes 
• Current readings of active power, reactive power, and voltage 
• Current status specific to the DER such as battery state of charge 
• Active operating limits for active, apparent and reactive power 
• Maximum capability or nameplate ratings 

Walk 

Manage: Once utilities and aggregators can see everything on their network, the next step is to actively manage those resources so that they operate within the network’s capacity. This includes either aggregated or direct control of behind-the-meter resources, or both. Using the data derived from the crawl phase, utilities and aggregators can develop schedules for the DERs on their network and use software to automate those schedules. Examples of such scheduling includes setting: 

• Solar PV DERs to curtail production to 95% between noon and 3 P.M. daily. By being able to control all the customer solar PV, utilities can enact curtailments more equitably across their networks and enable more connections, rather than putting moratoriums in place once the network is approaching saturation. 
• Battery energy storage to discharge into the grid between 6-7 P.M. Monday through Friday to alleviate the steep load increase during this time. By leveraging customer resources, peaker plants can remain offline. 
• Electric vehicles to charge during peak solar production hours, or during super off-peak hours between midnight and 5 A.M. 
• Business district DERs to send all their power generation to the grid on weekends when the district’s load is low. 

Setting schedules across a small subset of DERs to observe impacts and finetune scheduling is an ideal incremental step. Once lessons learned have been implemented, the right software can make it easy to scale up, applying the same mechanisms to greater numbers of DERs. 

Run 

Optimize: The next step after implementing schedules that keep thousands of behind-the-meter DERs running in synch with the daily demand rhythms of the grid is to optimize everything. Typically, we think of optimization as focused on a singular goal, like maximizing the production of renewables, reducing the amount of energy production that relies on fossil fuels, or ensuring network limitations are not exceeded. But with sophisticated software that incorporates artificial intelligence, multiple objectives can be targeted simultaneously. 

Multiple objective optimization requires a system capable of both forecasting anticipated grid conditions as well as receiving and responding to grid conditions in real time. Such a system analyzes inputs from multiple sources, including:

• Weather forecasts and current conditions 
• Historical load data 
• Infrastructure setup including voltage and capacity limits and network topology 

It uses those inputs to derive an optimal operating plan and executes that plan. But true optimization must respond to changing conditions as they arise, so the system must also integrate: 

• Current grid conditions from network sensors 
• Current operating status of all generating devices – both owned and behind-the-meter 
• Smart meter data 
• Other infrastructure data from SCADA, outage, and distribution management systems  

Sophisticated algorithms can handle complex computations like these, and with today’s processing power, can be run on readily available off-the-shelf computers. 

Fly 

Autonomous operation: Flying is a culmination of all the prior steps wrapped up in a single system that runs autonomously. Once all the various inputs are configured, the system uses artificial intelligence to develop and execute a plan and maintain the optimizations in the face of real time conditions without need of operator intervention.  

Technology exists today to enable utilities and aggregators to fly. The PXiSE Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) offers all the sophisticated automation and features discussed above and packages it in a single interface. For those ready to run or fly, this system is made for you. For those in the crawl or walk phase, PXiSE has a DER Management and Communication Platform that offers the visibility, data, and management needed for these phases. Both options offer scalability that enables the user to add more DERs as needed without having to start over with a whole new system. Which means you don’t need to know how many DERs you’re going to manage in the end—just start with a small sample size.   

As mentioned earlier, regardless of which phase you’re in, the important thing is to keep moving. At the risk of oversaturating this article with business clichés, you do not have to be flying the plane while you’re building it and you do not have to go big or go home. With something as critical as our power grid, it’s okay to start small, build something that works, test it, and only then go bigger. 

Visit PXiSE September 12-14, 2023 at booth #3873 at RE+ in Las Vegas, NV to learn more.