When you’re learning to ride a bike, training wheels can give you the confidence to practice the acceleration, braking and steering skills you’ll need while eliminating the concerns of losing your balance and falling off. And even if you have all the skills, the training wheels protect you and your bike from accidental damage and ease the concerns of those around you before you can demonstrate those new skills. Learning to ride a bike can be both terrifying and rewarding for you and those observing you.
Novel technology like a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) can evoke similar emotions among utility stakeholders. Trusting software to handle grid stability issues which have traditionally been managed by human operators and hardware is a big leap of faith, and it’s understandable why some may be skeptical. The stakes are high– finding vulnerabilities, the loss of control, fluctuations in power quality, and losing customer confidence are all legitimate fears and risks that utilities need to manage, making a conservative approach the prudent way forward.
Utilities know something needs to be done to get a grip on the growing number of customer distributed energy resources (DERs). However, without visibility into what the DERs are doing and how they’re impacting the power grid, electrical power operators are stuck in a reactive rather than proactive position, responding to load management concerns and frequency fluctuations with no clear path forward to stem the increasing number of alarms, not to mention threats of exceeding power network capacity constraints. And most are in agreement that the problem is only going to get worse, with the flood of solar PV and electric vehicles coming online.
A DERMS promises the capability to manage these concerns, but going back to our bicycle analogy, many utilities would prefer to start with something more elemental that empowers them to gain knowledge and confidence in how the new technology works and how it will impact their system, before diving into a fully automated solution.
One excellent place for utilities to start is with a DER management and communication platform. It enables a simplified means of testing, monitoring and analyzing what control of various customer DERs looks like and how that control impacts electrical power networks. This robust platform allows a utility to register, monitor and organize customer DERs, and to enable scheduled dispatches according to customizable groupings. Ideally located in the cloud, this platform can leverage the internet for communications, enabling the utility to be freed from physical distance constraints related to on-premise networks. With this data in hand, utilities can start to develop network models that help them build a case for bringing the power and autonomous control a DERMS provides. Some even consider this platform a scaled-down, baby step toward DERMS.
PXiSE’s white paper How to Scale Customer DER Management to Achieve Utility Goals Today—and Tomorrow offers insights into the benefits of starting small with a DER management and communication platform. The paper outlines advantages for distribution operators and planners and utility customer program teams and includes a snapshot of a successful pilot program.
Download the white paper to learn if a DER management and communication platform is just the version of training wheels your utility has been looking for.
