Generating and delivering energy to homes and businesses has never been a simple task. In retrospect, though, planning, managing and operating the energy system of the past was relatively simpler.

“The mentality of the planner was that they needed to offer reliability at least cost, and you do that by having control over the resources that can provide reliability in a firm manner,” said Carlos Romero, principal, technical sales for North America at Energy Exemplar, a provider of software that models electric, gas and water markets to enable better decision making across the energy value chain. “If you were in North America, that usually meant you had coal, you had gas, maybe you had nuclear available to choose from. It was fairly simplified. You knew what resources you had and what you needed to use to ensure reliability.”

Today’s energy system is vastly more complex than a decade ago, due primarily to climate change and the fourth industrial revolution, or industry 4.0. “Those two drivers have transformed into challenges around decarbonization, energy security, more active consumers, distributed energy resources (DERs), microgrids and the entrance of renewables and storage,” Romero said. “The challenge of providing reliability is now a lot more complex and sophisticated, and that has made the job of planners a lot more difficult.”

Why a siloed approach can’t help navigate complexity

Modern grid planners face myriad challenges, from extreme weather fueled by climate change to intermittent renewable generation, decarbonization mandates, growing numbers of prosumers and increasing demand for electricity. But ensuring a reliable grid is also challenging because most utilities rely on a traditional siloed approach in which generation, transmission and distribution planners use their own data and tools and don’t collaborate. 

Romero gives the example of hydrogen. Traditional siloed planning would prevent utilities from seizing the full potential value of hydrogen, which Romero says does not have a clear value proposition when evaluated in isolation. “You're basically saying, ‘We're going to take electricity and water and turn that into a gas. Then we're going to generate electricity by burning that gas in a combustion process that is highly inefficient,” Romero said. “Where is the business sense in that?”

If planners look at just one of the many components that go into analyzing hydrogen, its value won’t be clear. But, Romero says, if you model water availability, water storage, electricity and gas together, the picture changes. “If you do that in separate models, you're probably not going to end up with the right answer,” Romero explained. “You need to bring everything into one system to optimize everything rather than optimizing individual pieces.” Holistic, collaborative planning with shared data can identify the potential value of hydrogen as long-duration storage that can limit renewable curtailment, for example.  

Integrated system planning was built for complexity

Integrated system planning refers to the type of collaborative analysis that weighs myriad complex factors to develop optimal investments and solutions. Put simply, integrated system planning is the process to plan for a reliable, affordable and sustainable energy system that considers all the commodities and technologies available to a utility while coordinating collaboration between multiple stakeholders to ensure common and consistent scenarios, data and modeling assumptions.

While this definition would be familiar to traditional planners, the difference comes from the sheer number of variables, interdependencies and scenarios that planners must weigh to achieve reliability. There are three fundamental ingredients that make integrated system planning possible today:

• Technology: This includes computational power, but also software and data.
• Workflows: A common set of data and software is essential for integrated system planning. Equally vital are the integrated processes that draw planners out of their silos to work together.
• People: This includes senior executives who provide leadership and clear communication to ensure that everyone at a utility understands that integrated system planning is key to achieving their most important strategic objectives. It also includes managers and analysts in different business units who are responsible for the day-to-day work of planning. 

Getting started: Building an application map

One obstacle that often prevents utilities from beginning the necessary shift away from siloed planning is an understandable concern that integrated system planning demands more change than the utility can accommodate at once. But that concern shouldn’t forestall the urgent need to change. 

In Romero’s experience, the best place to start is with an information technology assessment. This means identifying the individual applications used for planning and looking for opportunities to rationalize their use. The process should be guided by making a significant immediate impact. “That could mean integrating the generation and transmission planning processes together,” Romero said. “What kind of tools do we have that can bring these business units together to do transmission and generation planning together in a single application? What data fits that application? What is the data that is needed? What is the kind of reporting that we want to have? What is the kind of hardware infrastructure that we need to have?”

By starting with a single connection point and demonstrating the value of greater integration, utilities can then add additional layers of connection that will move them toward full integrated system planning. Working with a partner that can provide a full software platform helps.

“Only an integrated software platform can do end-to-end energy planning and operations for energy companies, where you can go from price forecasting, transmission analysis, regulatory assessment, congestion and contingency analysis to generation planning to integrated system planning,” Romero said. “A platform offers the opportunity for energy companies to model all of their commodities in a single application and over different time horizons, as well as integrating DERs, virtual power plants, electric vehicles, hydrogen and anything else you need as part of your energy value chain.”

The increasing complexity of the energy system is inevitable. But how utilities respond to that complexity to achieve their fundamental mission of supplying reliable electricity is a choice. Integrated system planning enabled by a sophisticated software platform can help transform complexity from a challenge to an asset that helps utilities achieve a reliable, resilient and decarbonized grid. 

Contact Energy Exemplar to learn more about how the PLEXOS platform can help you on the road to integrated system planning.