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Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) is a multi-service utility owned by the City of Gainesville, Florida. As the state’s fifth largest municipal electric utility, GRU provides electric, water, wastewater and telecommunications services to  approximately 93,000 retail and wholesale customers in Gainesville and surrounding areas.

The GRU team wanted to improve outage management operations to better prepare for hurricane season and provide safe, reliable, competitively priced utility services in an environmentally responsible manner. By partnering with UDC and AspenTech, GRU was able to achieve this goal.

Join experts from GRU, UDC and AspenTech as they discuss:

• Even and reliable distribution of electricity across the network to avoid overloading any part of the system, outages or blackouts
• Responsiveness plan to address equipment failures, vegetation or animal issues, crew dispatch and safe, prompt service restoration           
• Distribution infrastructure maintenance for improved efficiency and reliability, including integrating new technologies such as smart meters and distributed energy resources

Gain insights on hurricane preparedness and more from GRU’s story. 
 

Panel:

Tony Holstein, Utility Project Team Leader, Gainesville Regional Utilities

With 22 years at Gainesville Regional Utilities, I bring extensive experience in utility operations, emergency management, and leadership. As Distribution Operations Manager at Systems Control, I have served in roles such as Emergency Management Coordinator, Planning Section Chief, and Cybersecurity Incident Response Lead. My expertise includes storm restoration and leading cross-departmental teams to enhance operational efficiency, safety, and customer satisfaction.

Richard Gunton, Technical Systems Analyst, Gainesville Regional Utilities 

 

Ron Yoshimura, Principal Consultant, UDC

Ron has 35+ years of experience developing and implementing enterprise software solutions for electric, gas, and water utilities using geospatial products from ESRI, General Electric, Intergraph, and IBM.  His background in GIS consulting includes OSI (Open Systems International) project implementations and supporting OSI mobile product development. Ron also developed network models to support OSI ADMS applications. As Principal Consultant for UDC, his main objective is ensuring UDC clients are provided with pragmatic business solutions to their unique and complex challenges. 

Derek Paquette, Sr. Director, Partner Programs, AspenTech Digital Grid Management

Derek Paquette is Senior Director for Partner Programs (Digital Grid Management) with over 28 years of consulting and system delivery experience in the utilities industry.  In the last three years with AspenTech, Derek has focused on building a Delivery Service Provider (DSP) ecosystem for the Digital Grid Management software suite.  

Sally Jacquemin, Vice President and General Manager, Power and Utilities, AspenTech

Sally Jacquemin is an industry professional with extensive experience in digital solutions for electric and gas utilities.  She oversees the overall business strategy, including customer engagement, organic and inorganic portfolio expansion, as well as global growth opportunities for AspenTech’s Digital Grid Management product suite including the AspenTech OSI monarch SCADA, Distribution Management, Transmission Management, Generation Management, Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), and Network Model Management applications.  She establishes and executes corporate strategies for the company’s Power and Utility business segment to ensure continued innovation and market leadership. 

The volume and pace of change facing electric utilities is daunting, the opportunities for load growth and leading the transition to a decarbonized, healthy and prosperous tomorrow are unprecedented.

Managing and supporting the clean energy transition is just one reason utilities must work to create a resilient, sustainable and intelligent grid. To build that grid of the future, utilities are adopting advanced digital tools to:

• Improve operational excellence and safety
• Mitigate cybersecurity and extreme weather threats
• Manage electrification and clean energy needs of the future

Read this white paper to learn about the digital technologies fueling the resilient grid of the future and about the companies already leveraging them.

One of the greatest obstacles to a clean energy future in the United States is a waiting list. By accelerating backlogged clean energy initiatives, the nation could significantly reduce its carbon output over the next few years.

Unfortunately, years-long approval processes and interconnection queues, compounded by the tremendous increase in the number of proposed projects spurred by federal initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, is creating extensive delays of renewable energy projects intended for commercial operation. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data shows that the duration from connection request to commercial operation has more than doubled, from less than two years in 2000 to 2007 to a median time of five years for projects built in 2022.

In just one example, Chicago-based utility Commonwealth Edison has 1,300 projects consisting of more than 2,600 megawatts of capacity in their renewable interconnection queue. This is indicative of the huge opportunity–and challenge–for renewable energy projects. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2023, renewable sources, including wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass and geothermal, produced nearly a quarter – 874 billion kilowatt-hours – of all power generated in the U.S., and that number is expected to rise.

Also according to the EIA, solar generation in the US is expected to increase from 163 billion kilowatt hours in 2023 to 286 billion in 2025, an increase of more than 75 percent. Over the same time, wind power is predicted to grow by 11 percent, from 430 billion kilowatt hours in 2023 to 476 billion in 2025.

The challenge ahead is less about demand, and more about how to deploy these clean energy projects at the scale needed to realize their benefits.

For example, the developer of a proposed solar farm must work with the local utility on a lengthy engineering review and grid capacity analysis before they even break ground. Lengthy electrical planning studies are necessary to evaluate whether the current electrical capacity of the grid will require new equipment investment. These processes can take years and may require the added investment of funding system upgrades to the grid. As delays drag on, the support for projects often looks different–investors may lose interest or the economics change. It’s not uncommon for developers to abandon renewable energy projects altogether.

Technology as an Accelerator

Among the many pathways utilities are pursuing to contribute to the nation’s clean energy goals, data and digital technology have emerged as ways to both accelerate innovation and mitigate growing delays between interconnection requests and commercial operation.

A renewable energy initiative recently adopted by California regulators helps projects avoid backlogs and the need for costly upgrades, in exchange for allowing utility operators to curtail the amount of power they send into the grid under certain circumstances. While California is the first state to adopt regulations that formalize the concept, this has been done for years by utilities around the country. Digital technology is enhancing these kinds of state and federal initiatives.

For instance, a utility with a distributed energy resources management system (DERMS) installed can improve operator decision making around how to effectively integrate renewables into the grid, while ensuring safety and reliability are not compromised. With DERMS, utilities can be less concerned about grid capacity in the approval process because they can dynamically control renewable output in real-time to prevent back feeds and overloads while adhering to physical grid constraints. This capability can reduce the interconnection analysis required and ensure faster approvals of renewable interconnection applications.

A few years ago, DERMS was critical in helping a U.S. utility with a two-megawatt solar farm accelerate a significant interconnection approval backlog. The backlog was due, in part, to having already reached renewable capacity at some of its physical grid locations. Data from the utility’s DERMS allowed them to work with the owner of the solar array to devise a plan to automatically curtail solar generation under certain circumstances to prevent back feeds of power onto the grid. With this new automation in place, the utility was able to approve additional renewable projects on the circuit, tripling the amount of renewable generation capacity supported on this circuit to six megawatts.

Mitigating Risks & Costs

Digital technology will also play a supplemental role in the long-term success of clean energy projects. Once proposed projects reach regulators for permitting, data can show precise information on a project’s value and risk, and ultimately help reduce their time to approval. The faster projects are deployed, the cheaper the cost of both renewable technologies and the electricity they generate, which ultimately reduces the green premium associated with such project.

There is too much at stake for long interconnection queues and wait times to be the reason we’re unable to reach our collective net zero goals. Digital technology offers one pathway to creating those solutions. Now is the time to put it to us.