The Time for DERMS is Now

Across the globe, communities are facing the issue of how to incorporate decentralized, home-grown energy sources into the grid without impacting grid stability. To do so, utilities need to engage with a spectrum of energy “prosumers” and then manage various resources from residential solar panels to traditional gas or diesel power plants.

Managing all of these resources while minimizing reverse power flows and intermittency issues is a huge challenge. Failure to do so results in major wasted opportunity when it comes to utilizing greener energy sources, lowering our collective carbon footprint, reducing fuel usage, and lowering costs for both utilities and consumers.

DERMS - distributed energy resource management systems - are the key to unlocking community renewable energy potential. While many believe DERMS to be a thing of the future, something to be considered after further development, DERMS solutions are being utilized right now, and have far-reaching potential today to accelerate zero-carbon energy ambitions.

PXiSE teamed up with Australia’s Horizon Power to create the first fully implemented DERMS in the world, which went live in 2020. This week, in partnership with Guidehouse, we’ve released a whitepaper exploring how the system was designed and implemented, and how it’s already made an impact on Western Australia’s greening grid.

Horizon Power is a utility in Western Australia serving an enormous remote area five times the size of California. It faced a unique challenge in the coastal town of Onslow: how to effectively manage a broad array of power sources and distribute it to a range of isolated communities while ensuring reliability.

To meet this challenge, Horizon Power deployed a state-of-the-art DERMS from PXiSE that uses two-way, sensor-based technology to monitor the grid in real time, mitigating disturbances and balancing variable solar generation, energy storage, and other available resources, including customer demand.

This deployment has already led to several notable achievements:

• A three-fold increase in renewable hosting capacity
• Reduced DER communication bandwidth traffic usage by 75%, resulting in direct ongoing cost savings
• The 11 MW microgrid is expected to reduce natural gas consumption by over 55,000 GJ, lowering costs across its entire network while also eliminating 3,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually

These results can be replicated and even amplified now in other grids around the world. To learn how we did it, download the Whitepaper here!