Adapting to the Flexible Nature of Distributed Energy Resources

Strategic deployment of the Smart Grid is enabling an integrated portfolio of technologies and mechanisms that facilitate higher levels of distributed energy resources (DER’s) such as energy efficiency and renewable energy resources by providing increased electric system flexibility for today’s utility. While energy efficiency can be largely self-standing, flexible resources which support necessary system flexibility/reliability functions are frequently enabled by the advanced monitoring, controls and information features of the Smart Grid.

Addressing New and Emerging DER’s

New technologies, with increased flexibility, are required to manage the additional variability and uncertainty that renewable energy resources such as wind and solar introduce into the electric system. Intermittent renewable generation can reduce inertia and primary frequency response, cause large-scale changes in generation, and cause stability issues. It can affect power quality, voltage control and reactive power management at the local level.

As a result, additional flexibility is required in the various time frames relevant to utility operations of milliseconds, seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days and beyond to many days to meet variability needs.

This need for increased flexibility affects long-term transmission and resource adequacy planning and makes it more costly to balance load and generation at all times. System reliability and stability and third-party contract provisions may take precedence over economic dispatch-based decisions. Strategies for addressing this can be seen in the utilities’ integrated resource plans (IRPs).

Sophisticated communications and controls available from the Smart Grid help provide the new flexible resources needed to accommodate high amounts of energy produced by variable renewable energy resources. New and emerging resources have more integrated electronic features than existing technologies.

NEW EMERGING FLEXIBLE RESOURCES INCLUDE:

• Fixed and Mobile Energy Storage
• New Types of Demand Response
• Improved Forecasting of Renewable Energy Resources
• New Methods of Reserves Management

Smart Grid Technologies Providing Flexibility

The Smart Grid enables flexible technologies necessary for successful integration of intermittent DER’s. Utilities require both fast acting power system solutions that respond to real-time situations and slower acting centralized analytical solutions that include forecasting and longer-term resource management.

The level of challenges depend on the amount, size, location, and voltage levels of the interconnected resources; the capabilities of those resources for dispatch and communication (and similar Smart Grid capabilities); and the ability of the grid to accept generation at multiple distributed sites and to flow power as needed in the opposite direction to than initially designed.

In preparing themselves for the increased penetration of renewable Distributed Generation (DG), utilities realize the need to investigate and apply smart grid solutions such as smart metering, smart communications solutions, distributed monitoring and control, and Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) applications.

These Smart Grid solutions have far-reaching value beyond supporting a higher penetration of DG resources. The various enabling technologies are designed to meet a range of utility operational efficiencies, reliability improvements, and customer service enhancements.

Solutions such as ADMS, for example, are designed to provide a higher level of awareness of grid status and provide methods to control and respond in more real-time fashion. This provides value in identifying and responding to outage conditions, providing more efficient asset optimization, gathering substantially more data for downstream analytic tools, and other new operational processes.

The Smart Grid enabled solution for managing all of the many diverse DER devices in a system is a Distributed Energy Resources Management System, or DERMS. DERMS is an enterprise application which provides the central control necessary to handle all of the smart DER devices throughout a distribution system by monitoring and managing the status and capabilities of each device and feeding that information into an ADMS and other applications in a more useful form.

Additionally, the value of the disparate smart grid solutions such as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) or Smart Metering, depending on terminology used, DERMS, DMS, Outage Management System (OMS) and System Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) are increased through synergies created by integrating the solutions together and implementing a cohesive Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS). The integration of ADMS and DERMS technologies is critical in supporting the new requirements that micro-grids are levying on utilities.

By proactively embracing these changes, utilities can begin to shape the myriad of planning and operating approaches that maximize the potential long-term benefits to the utility and its customers of distributed energy resources.

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