Dive Summary:
- The global market for distribution management systems (DMS) will steady grow and increase from $507 million in 2013 to $935 million in 2020, a report from Navigant Research finds.
- A DMS is a large-scale control system which acts as the brain of the power distribution network and supports all aspects of utility grid operations.
- “Following in the wake of large smart grid deployments, information technology upgrades are driving the rollout of advanced distribution management systems in the near term,” explains Kristoffer Torvik, senior research analyst with Navigant Research. “Also contributing to advances in this space is a range of benefits including increased reliability and cost-effective optimization. Moreover, rapidly growing interest in integrating distributed energy resources, motivated by renewables integration and demand response programs, is spurring innovation.”
From the article:
“Utilities of all sizes have installed management systems such as supervisory control and data acquisition, outage management systems, DMS, or a combination of the three. The report says smaller utilities must often fit their modernization efforts into tight operational expenditure budgets, while the bigger utilities typically have larger capital expenditure budgets. In either case, according to the report, utility managers must strike a balance between the benefits provided by a DMS and the cost of procuring, installing, operating and maintaining the system.”