Introduction:

The utility industry today is rife with technology marketed toward improving grid management and control techniques. Capturing the limelight is Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS). ADMS has vaulted to the top of utility executives’ priority lists based on its promise of integrating existing real-time systems with advanced visualizations and functionality that streamline operations ensuring utilities are better positioned to meet reliability and resiliency goals. ADMS is also viewed as a cornerstone to the utilities’ ability to respond and participate in a changing market in a way that keeps them relevant to both consumers and emerging players. Most utility organizations place ADMS front and center.

However, ADMS is only an element of what should be a utility’s overall Advanced Grid Management program. Thinking about Advanced Grid Management, regarding ADMS alone will result in missed business opportunities and misplaced or wasted investment (e.g., rip and replace), causing the need for significant additional investments in the future. Instead, utilities should first pause and develop a holistic strategy for Advanced Grid Management that incorporates technology, systems, people and processes needed to support the evolving fundamental shift in how today’s utilities operate. Building a roadmap based on such a strategy will help utilities be more assured that the technology decisions they make, such as implementing an ADMS, will support their long-term objectives and minimize risk.

What is Advanced Grid Management?

The key to any grid modernization strategy is the combination of automated operations across the entire utility value chain from generation (central or distributed) through transmission and distribution, and to the customer and back. It enables the dynamic operation of the grid and includes grid automation, operational digitization and grid management and operations.

While each of these categories includes advanced technology, individually, they do not achieve Advanced Grid Management. Advanced Grid Management must include the integration and optimization of these technologies and their related data, alterations to business processes and changes to the skills required for grid operations. Advanced Grid Management brings them together in an orchestrated fashion to provide real-time situational awareness and enhance decision making while increasing the safety and reliability of the grid.
 

The Need for an Advanced Grid Management Strategy

Utilities have a plethora of reasons why they are thinking about the advancement of their grid technology and engaging in the deployment of various technologies. Some of these include reliability improvements, energy efficiency gains, the management and integration of DER, combined T&D situational intelligence, analytics that enable operations to become highly effective in making decisions on real-time events to contribute to highly-effective, lower cost operations in the control center and the field.

Developing a holistic strategy for Advanced Grid Management will ensure that not only these objectives are met but, there is a logical, well thought out plan for achieving them. An Advanced Grid Management strategy defines what is needed to grow the utility business, bringing value to shareholders while also helping to ensure their utility stays relevant in a future where customers have more options. Regulators are still “figuring out” what they will/will not demand from utility operations. Proactively developing an Advanced Grid Management strategy is in a utility’s best interest and can help drive the regulator’s decisions as well as ensure the utility meets its obligations despite the changing environment.

Specifically, the Advanced Grid Management strategy will:

• Identify the capabilities and functions needed to achieve business objectives
• Align the investment strategy with the maturity of the technology and the marketplace
• Ensure investments are purposeful and minimize misplaced investment
• Align activities to the end game to ensure focus for the enterprise
• Support the organizational change management needed to support the grid of the future
• Maintain flexibility to ensure the objectives are aligned to changing market, regulatory environment and the utility’s future objectives

Developing an Advanced Grid Management Strategy

One of the keys to formulating the strategy will be the alignment of the utility’s vision and objectives. From selecting and implementing new or upgraded technologies and the data integration strategy between the systems to the analytics and change management strategies -- everything must be aligned. Users must be prepared with the right skill sets and supporting processes at the time of deployment to ensure a successful, new functionality rollout. This applies to all new products or services, including new information to customers on grid performance, consumption and alternative energy products.

The strategy must also consider the digital utility of the future. A digitally integrated utility can automate work and incorporate new technologies such as wearables, systems automation, digitalization of operational process, automating security and compliance. This will also enable grid edge analytics that makes decisions on how to utilize assets in real-time for power quality, load, energy efficiency, energy arbitrage, restoration of service and public and utility member safety.

To achieve these objectives, an effective Advanced Grid Management strategy must consider:

• Integration of management systems into a holistic view of transmission and distribution operations
• The change in how users interact to coordinate and organize the work of managing the grid
• Capitalizing on new information sources that provide more insights than what is currently available
• Bridging the gaps between utility operations and customer activities with real-time data
• Bringing new value through analytics, to both grid managers and customers.
• How to be adaptable to industry changes
• Incorporation of new and evolving distribution automation technology
• Grid edge enabled decision making
• How to maintain and enhance ROI through reliability, safety and energy management
• Integration of DER and flexibility to enable future energy market opportunities
• Extensibility for incorporating new, future technologies
• Full integration with all IT and OT systems
• The ability to provide efficiency through operation and control center situational intelligence

An Advanced Grid Management strategy that is missing one or more of these is likely to under deliver on the expected value while potentially increasing workload rather than gaining the intended efficiencies.

Significant benefits can be realized by following a robust methodology to define an Advanced Grid Management strategy.
 

Source: BRIDGE Energy Group
 

The key output from an Advanced Grid Management strategy development effort will be a robust roadmap for the utility to follow that defines the prioritized sequence of investments necessary to ensure alignment with an achievement of the utility’s “Grid of the Future” vision and objectives. There are four primary components to defining the strategy and developing this roadmap to the future.

1. Capabilities assessment & technology alignment

The capabilities and functionality desired will drive technology architecture and decisions and will impact how the grid of the future is managed. For example, how you offer DER integration services will affect the requirements for your DERMS systems and the integration with your ADMS platform. If the utility is the owner of the inverter technology, this can significantly simplify how DERMS works. However, if you are in a jurisdiction that mandates open markets to third-party DER providers, being able to perform switching functions can quickly become difficult and unsafe where DER installations are not known. This is only one example of why the technology decisions and integration points are critical, others include:

• A unified operated state across all integrated systems
• Ability to communicate securely with SCADA and distribution automation devices
• Ability to have separate, secure communications channels for DER managements
• Considering the future of distribution-based energy trading from third-parties and prosumers
• Effectively provide insights into the best DER deployment locations
• Enable grid edge decisions through distributed and centralized analytics
• Have a secure, integrated service bus for real-time information exchanges among systems like ADMS, GIS, OMS, EMS, DERMS, DRMS

These decisions will have a dramatic impact on your technology decisions and the investments necessary to support the desired capabilities.

2. Investment plan

The investment plan takes into consideration the technology and integration gaps identified, the required investments, the value of the investment and the time-to-value needed to create the strategic roadmap for deployment of the technologies and change management necessary to support Advanced Grid Management. The investment plan is one of the key drivers for turning the strategy into an actionable deployment roadmap for Advanced Grid Management.

The plan identifies technologies already in place (i.e., grid automation, management systems like SCADA and GIS) and considers the “quick hit” visualization opportunities, system enhancements, or integrations that can be deployed near-term to add immediate value while planning and selections for longer-term deployments and integrations (i.e., DMS, DERMS, DRMS) are taking place. These “quick hits” not only add immediate value but also can be vital to testing use cases and determining requirements for these more robust grid management applications.

3. Data assessment, integration and governance framework

One of the key benefits on the path to enabling Advanced Grid Management is the ability to understand and enhance the use of data. In many utilities today, data is still siloed, costly to integrate, lacks significant governance and is not able to be leveraged to provide the power of information for better business decisions.

Development of the roadmap in support of the Advanced Grid Management strategy should include an understanding of the data necessary to support the capabilities and functionality of Advanced Grid Management, a verification of the existing data and the gaps, as well as a data validation approach and governance framework to ensure data availability and accuracy.

4. Organizational change management

Implementation of the Advanced Grid Management strategy will require a significant change to the organizational processes and people that support it. For example, while the fundamental efforts of repairing assets or restoring customer power may not change, the amount of information that becomes available to the operators and field workers is game-changing. How that information is presented to knowledge workers, and the effective use of it will have significant process impacts.

There will also be emerging cases of situational intelligence that have never been seen before due to predictive analytics running at both the grid edge and the grid management core. These predictions will often contradict the experiences and group knowledge that operators have relied on in the past. Knowledge workers must be equipped with the tools to adapt to new information that situational intelligence workers will encounter. It is imperative that understanding organizational change readiness - development of the change management strategies are an integral part of the development of the overall strategy to ensure a successful implementation of the Advanced Grid Management.

A Cautionary Note

Realizing the full potential of Advanced Grid Management will require careful attention to current regulatory compliance requirements and, in some cases, may necessitate new pressure to examine the validity of a requirement in this new paradigm. For example, NERC CIP mandates that technology mitigating control must be in place for sufficient wall off access to EMS/SCADA systems, remote terminal units (RTUs) and connected devices providing instrumentation of the transmission network. The security associated with the implementation of Advanced Grid Management technologies such as ADMS systems must carefully consider this separation between the distribution and transmission network. Now that the exchange of data between the worlds of transmission and distribution is a “critical path” to enabling Advanced Grid Management, the entire security strategy must be redesigned to ensure “bad actors” or internal mistakes are quickly identified and dealt with in near real-time fashion.

Security and compliance factors can bring considerable consternation to your Advanced Grid Management roadmap if not well thought out in advance. Thinking through how physical and virtual control centers work and will be secured and maintained in compliance in the new world is a must to ensure mitigation strategies remain viable, enforceable, and documentable.

Conclusion: The Journey to Advanced Grid Management

Advanced Grid Management is not an application. Rather, it is a complex journey with great potential, and its success is realized through a significant commitment. It requires the development of a holistic, well-defined strategy that should begin with the end in mind and move the utility through a logical, methodical process that results in an actionable investment plan and roadmap. The roadmap is then used to drive the necessary incremental investments and decisions for implementation which are informed and validated through analytics, assure compliance and security are maintained, and incorporate the appropriate organizational changes along the way to ensure success.

A well-planned Advanced Grid Management strategy and supporting roadmap will create shareholder value in newly deployed assets and will enhance customer satisfaction by providing valued information and relevant offers, enabling faster decision-making and the increasing reliability that will result in a safer utility for both employees and customers.