Digitisation – Making grid future ready

Electric grid is becoming more and more important when we are looking towards electrifying the whole economy due to climate change.

There is so much uncertainty with regards to climate change. How we have looked into the past will not help how we look into the future. So when we are thinking of the grid which is the backbone of the any country’s critical infrastructure, a backbone of national competitiveness and economic growth. So without a reliable and resilient grid we have threats to that competitiveness. Electricity grid is one of the biggest testimony of ingenuity and it is serving its purpose from quite some time. Now there is lot of demand coming to grid due climate uncertainty and our goals for net zero to bring in more renewables to this biggest machine.

Now that we need to think of grid for future it important to think of ways to bring in the reliability and resilience. The recent memory of Texas grid failure episode in US, which resulted in ~5million people without power for multiple days. This is an indication that we shall be prepared for the impact of extreme weather on the grid as Texas experience extreme cold and in California in 2020 it was extreme heat which made the grid issue.

Weather events have gone more and more severe typically in particular regions. The weather events like “Sandy” is getting more and more extreme, though in India we are still better as compared to western parts like US where the grid is getting older and more fragile. These events strain the power ecosystem, though the sector is getting ready for bitter weather events but there are other areas as well which are getting involved due to climate change like extreme rains, wild fires, which can’t be handled by the grid alone. This calls for the interconnection working with various other departments within government. Therefore, this becomes more important than ever for both social and economic security of the nation when electricity is the backbone of the critical infrastructure of a country.  

Due to these climate changes, generation technologies are changing significantly. More renewables are getting part of the grid and also they are becoming much more distributed and we are moving away from old central generating plants. These distributed energy has introduced many new generators like rooftops, small solar plants etc. This makes virtually each person living in a city a generator. Therefore, we need technology to control all these new generators.

Digitisation which is sweeping all other industry will sweep power sector as well.

We generally turn-on a blub by just a flip of a light switch and never just think from what is that powering the electricity bulb and from where it is coming? It’s our grid, which making it happen and this light bulb and the complexity happening behind the scenes on the electric grid, is a key piece to solving the climate crisis. It’s how we’re going to mitigate the risk of extreme storms flooding our cities, avoid scorching the Earth with severe drought, and ensure that our children and grandchildren inherit a habitable planet, but we need to rethink how the grid works and our relationship with it.

We need to stop transacting with the grid and start interacting with it. But before we go talk about the future of the grid, let’s go back to that light switch. When you turn it on, it closes a circuit that connects your light bulb to the rest of the electric grid.

The grid senses this new demand, and somewhere, probably far away from your light bulb, a power plant generates just a little more power. That adjustment happens basically instantaneously. Across the whole grid, we have less than a minute’s worth of storage, so the electrons flowing through your bulb were produced just moments beforehand. As users of electricity, our experience is completely transactional: Flip switch, consume power, pay bill. We don’t need to know how it works; it just does.

But what happens when it doesn’t work? What happens if that power plant doesn’t increase its generation to meet the demand from your laptop?

Blackout !!!!

Not just for your light bulb, but across the whole grid. Now, historically the grid has prevented blackouts a certain way. As demand varies over the course of the day, big power plants, primarily fossil fuel power plants, ramp up and down to match it. But that is not going to cut it if the grid is going to solve climate change.

Right now, over 50% of the power flowing on the grid comes from fossil fuels. Producing that power contributes one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. As is, the grid is a huge contributor to climate change, but going forward, it’ll be an even bigger part of the solution.

Now the solution?

It’s not just as simple as replacing existing fossil generation with carbon-free alternatives. To solve climate change we’re going to need to electrify basically everything: transportation, heating, manufacturing. By doing that, by electrifying everything, the grid becomes integral to addressing nearly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But by doing that, we will double how much electricity we need, and all of it has to come from carbon-free sources.

So the question: “How do we solve climate change?”

actually turns into:

“How do we build and operate a grid without fossil fuels?”

Now, renewables are finally ramping up.

Today, wind and solar produce roughly 10% of the world’s electricity, but integrating them into the grid isn’t always seamless. Before, the only thing we had to worry about was uncertainty in demand, but renewables add uncertainty and variability to generation too, and that uncertainty causes high price volatility.

Here’s a simple example:

A wind farm is happily spinning along, generating low-priced power, but suddenly the wind stops blowing, and to keep meeting demand, another more expensive power plant makes up the difference, causing prices to skyrocket.

Now, imagine hundreds of thousands of wind and solar farms spread across the grid. That’s the grid we need to solve the climate crisis, but it means that these price dynamics will happen millions of times over.

We need to moderate these dynamics, while preserving the stable and reliable electricity that we have today. To do that, we’ll be reimagining how the grid works. Rather than ramping fossil fuel power plants to meet demand, renewables will be spreading across the grid, rapidly adjusting their production as weather conditions change.

Electric vehicles will be acting as mobile batteries, drawing and then contributing power to the grid wherever they’re connected. Smart thermostats and appliances will be making our buildings a little warmer or colder, or shifting the time of day that our dishwashers run to better match when power is available. Intelligent factories will be automatically adjusting their production, increasing throughput when power is abundant and scaling back as prices rise.

Massive batteries will be absorbing energy in periods of excess and returning it to the grid when supplies run short. The grid is becoming this interactional place, with all of these components working together to ensure balance and stability. But what’s missing here is the underlying technology that ties all of these interactional components together.

This grid needs a brain.

Each device will be responsible for making its own decisions. Those decisions will depend on algorithms that predict future costs and availability of electricity. Just like we use weather forecasts to decide whether to bring a sweater, the pieces of our future grid are going to need price forecasts to know when to use or produce power because remember, if the grid isn’t in perfect balance:

Blackout !!!

The brain needs to be using rapid, hyper-localized, physics-based forecasts of grid dynamics across both short and long timescales. We need to confront the real world – competing values, and interests; questions of political, technological, economic feasibility -to make that brain a reality.

Digitalisation is a new era for power systems or we can also say for energy ecosystem as whole. The term digitalisation is an amalgamation of three aspects; IDA (can be read “idea”)

1.      Interconnections

2.      Data

3.      Analytics

The first step is to establish the channels for interconnections between human to machines and also machines to machine(s); which can help to generate data; further putting analytics on top, of can help us to develop intelligence for effective decision making.

AI and physics based algorithmic models can help us to anticipate the needs of the grid. These algorithms can guide each battery, each thermostat, each factory to make the choices that keep our grid operating efficiently and reliably. It will not only solve the climate crisis but digitisation can prepare a solution which have self-regulating capability to keep conditions favorable to life. It’s a lot like an ant colony acting beyond the awareness of each individual ant, and our future grid is exactly the same.

All of our daily actions must work symbiotically to maintain a healthy, stable system. We have all the pieces that we need to solve the climate crisis, or at least most of them. We have batteries, we have renewables, we have smart thermostats. Now we just have to bring them all together.

It requires us to stop transacting and start interacting with the grid. It requires us to become the grid.