Joining forces

By Duncan Botting

Why a truly intelligent grid can’t exist without a union of ICT and energy, argues Duncan Botting.

“We're saying to the customer, 'You need a PhD to understand all of the information that we're going to give you so that you can control our networks for us,' because that's effectively what we're asking them to do.”
-Duncan Botting

The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Duncan Botting, Managing Director of ITI Energy, at the recent Next Generation Utilities summit in Bremen, Germany.

I'd like to talk today about the language of smart grid - many of us are talking about smart grid, yet each of us comes to it from a different context. We either come to it from an academic point of view, a generation point of view, a transmission point of view, or a distribution point of view. Language is used quite freely, and sometimes we don't understand it.

What is the vision of smart grid and what do we understand? What language are we using with smart grid? I'm going to look at the title because it's quite important to understand the language of the title before we move forward.

Oxymoron or synergy?

I'm going to give you a couple of examples so you understand what the word 'oxymoron' means. Cruel to be kind is an oxymoron; so is team of mavericks. Energy and IT, is that an oxymoron?

Synergy - most of us have had the word sufficiently often to understand that synergy is where the whole is greater than the part. If you take all of the components of a smart grid, when you put them together it adds up to something bigger than just the single component. So are energy and IT a synergy or an oxymoron?

Why do I ask this question? Because we are in a situation where power networks are being invaded by something called ICT or IT, and there's a belief that all we have to do is throw in IT and a power network and suddenly it becomes smart. I question that. Not only do I question it, I question the people who believe they understand that the IT is the smart grid. The integration of the power network with the ICT is where the real power comes from.

We all understand energy and deal with it every day. If you're a power engineer you get very upset when the media use the words energy and power interchangeably, and there's a language issue, because they don't understand what it means.

Different outlooks

In terms of what we really truly understand about energy and IT, there are some differences. So what is IT? I'm an electronics engineer, and electronics to me traditionally meant hardware. Then I grew up and I understood that the hardware is useless without software, and software became the big topic. And then the connection of hardware and software and between groups of hardware and software was more important. Then we had the World Wide Web; this had a completely different meaning to ICT.

Everybody has a different context; they sit in one of these different worlds. Take wide-area networks (WAMs) for example: vectors being monitored second-by-second around the network. This is a specific application of ICT to the power network. There's another one: factory storage. The ICT is the important bit of the power storage; without it the whole thing falls apart.

The issue is that everybody has a different set of glasses on when they're talking about their particular version of IT.

Then we have centralized versus distributed in terms of the words centralized and distributed. Many people from the generation side would take the generation of centralized district power as the meaning of these words. But we could be talking about distributed power, such as the intelligence to deal with demand-side participation.

What are these different terminologies we're all using so freely? We all speak different languages and understand something completely different than the person speaking to us. Everybody thinks they understand exactly what the other person is saying, but they don't.

One of the real issues that I find is this issue of smart or dumb. I believe smart metering when it rolls out is pretty dumb. The functionality that we are getting immediately is automatic metering. In terms of the integration into a smart grid, the active network isn't going to be there to be able to react to the dynamic that we're getting. So it's more refined smart metering, which is actually pretty dumb metering.

Here we have the two specific networks that we're talking about, energy and IT, or power network and IT. It's all about infrastructure, the bottom rung of the intelligence infrastructure. And a smart grid according to most people is this.

In terms of traditional thinking, what do we do to deal with a complex problem? We break it down into a simpler problem, and then we deal with the simpler problem. Once we get a solution out of the simple model what do you think we do? We take the solution, put it into action, and then are surprised it doesn't solve the original problem that we started with. It causes other problems, because we've made assumptions and made it simpler.

We do this all the time, and end up with silos of transmission and distribution and customs generation, and we really haven't done very well dealing with the real complexity in each of those silos. When you come to a smart grid, it's the matrix across all of those that is the difficult part.

W need to now do systemic thinking from a smart grid point of view. The easy wins have gone and the difficult questions have to be dealt with in a smart grid systemic activity. How many of you have seen an electron understand a contract? When the electron comes from the generation, it's wandering down the cable, and it suddenly rushes into a different contract area. And it says, "No, no, no. I understand the contract, but I can't go there in this line. I'm going to go this way." That's not what happens, is it?

We have a problem, because we believe that we can change the laws of physics with a contract. We cannot.

Design elements

I'm going to take a quick look at smart measuring. If I asked power engineers to design an energy management system, with the solution that we've used for smart measuring in the back of our mind, how would we develop an energy management system?

Let's make a comparison with the car industry. When we design a car, do we have a display on the dashboard with every single piece of data we need - torque, engine temperature, all of the different characteristics and elements that we would need to understand how to drive a car at any point in time? Is that how it is delivered? No. Did anybody come and ask the customer what energy management system they wanted? No.

The car industry turned around and said, "We know best. What they want is to actually drive the car with good fuel efficiency and drivability." So what are we doing with the smart meters? We're saying to the customer, "You need a PhD to understand all of the information that we're going to give you so that you can control our networks for us," because that's effectively what we're asking them to do.

Second by second they're going to watch their old display on a smart meter and understand that they have the opportunity to change the way that the network operates, whereas an energy management system would have taken all that data, not shared it with the customer at all, and done it automatically behind the scenes and given them the solution. So when I talk about smart and dumb, I think we have some issues around how we see changing behavior as the issue.

Then I ask the question, are we delivering a smart grid? The way we are going at the moment, we are not delivering a smart grid at all. We are likely to have more of the same, more traditional but bigger infrastructure, not integrated, but connected. And what do I mean by integrated versus connected? Companies in the industry are interested in connecting. But it's somebody else's problem once they've connected. As long as they can sell their product they're happy. In terms of actually how we efficiently integrate that, with maybe a connection to the demand side to balance the intermittency of some of their problem, there might be a much different solution to the one we're looking at.

If we get into the detail of a smart grid you will see that we've gone from one-way power flow to two-way power flow. What's the biggest issue in the distribution networks that we haven't even started to look at? Do you know how many electromechanical devices we still have on the distribution input? Do you know how smart electromechanical devices are, actually building with changing the direction of the power flow and the settings that will need to be changed, etc.?

There's a huge problem in terms of the detail that we're not going to get into. We're talking about big scale things; it's easy to get a smart grid. But the investment in people skills is going to be huge.

Major change

As we move towards adaptive protection, this where you change the curve in real time. We're going to go from a passive grid of distribution, where you understand what the peak demand load is, because you designed the network for it. That's what we used to do. Now we've got to make it fit such that we can use the network.

The problem is that we are struggling to deal with the actual components and elements that we've got on the smart grid and we are rushing forward in trying to put regulation around much of this, so we haven't got a connection between the two of them. There are projects going ahead where we do not understand what effect policy and regulations have had on one hand versus the technical solution that may or may not operate on the other.

In my mind we need to look at this as a systemic problem, and I believe there's a whole range of detail that isn't being discussed and needs to be discussed before we rush headlong into a solution. For instance, smart measuring; we're rolling out smart measuring come what may by the end of 2017. Is that the right solution? How smart is that implementation versus the way that it's going to interact in the future?

The concept then that we move towards is a totally integrated process, and totally integrated means the power network needs to use ICT, not ICT needs to use the power network.

The biggest barrier we will have is finding the people with the right skill sets to understand and know now they're no longer just energy, no longer just ICT, but the true integration of those two elements. And it's clear to me that we don't have that alpha presence, not even in our latest thinking.

For the future, because we are going to go to a situation whereby the speed of change increases, and because politicians will want and need to differ on something, it's going to be hard for us to deliver something that is useful and flexible and economically viable, versus Asia and the US, Because both of those areas are playing a much smarter game now.

Energy and IT are not separate entities, and we need to obviously re-connected and redraw the story of energy and IT, rather than allowing Oracle, IBM and SAP to tell us what the power system will look like in the future. Grid architecture is the underlying key issue. It is the technical architecture of the power network that needs to change. What we have done over the last 20 to 25 years is overlaid the infrastructure with different models, but we have not changed the physical architecture.

Now we're going to have to change that physical architecture alone. We're going to have to change that physical architecture at the same time as changing the promotional models at the same time as changing the environmental models.

In terms of true intelligence, I would say we are heading towards a situation which is a bigger traditional solution of what we've already had, and not a smart grid at all.

European Energy Grid Initiative

The European Electricity Grid Initiative (EEGI) Roadmap 2010-18 and Implementation Plan 2010-12, has been prepared by ENTSO-E and EDSO-SG in close collaboration with the European Commission, ERGEG and other relevant stakeholders.

The EEGI is one of the European Industrial Initiatives under the Strategic Energy Technologies Plan (SET-PLAN) and proposes a nine-year European research, development and demonstration programme to accelerate innovation and the development of the electricity networks of the future in Europe. The programme focuses on system innovation rather than on technology innovation, and addresses the challenge of integrating new technologies under real life working conditions and validating the results.

The SET PLAN supports European energy and climate policies through technology innovation. It aims to coordinate efforts at national and EU level through joint strategic planning and effective implementation mechanisms. European Industrial Initiatives are industry-driven strategic technology alliances to address key low-carbon energy technologies.

ENTSO-E is the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, representing 42 Transmission System Operators (TSOs) from 34 countries. Founded in December 2008, it's legal raison d'être is Regulation (EC) 714/2009 on electricity cross-border exchanges.

EDSO-SG (European DSO Association for SmartGrids) has recently been created by a number of distribution system operators and is open to wide membership.

The two associations, jointly with the European Technology Platform SmartGrids, will play an important role in the planning, monitoring and dissemination of this initiative. In the dissemination of the results regarding the distribution network, Eurelectric will also play a key role.

What is a smart grid?

Although there is no standard global definition, the European Technology Platform SmartGrids defines smart grids as electricity networks that can intelligently integrate the behaviour and actions of all users connected to it -  generators, consumers and those that do both - in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure electricity supplies.

What does a smart grid do?

A smart grid employs innovative products and services together with intelligent monitoring, control, communication, and self-healing technologies in order to

    * Better facilitate the connection and operation of generators of all sizes and technologies

    * Allow consumers to play a part in optimising the operation of the system

    * Provide consumers with greater information and options for choice of supply

    * Significantly reduce the environmental impact of the whole electricity supply system

    * Maintain or even improve the existing high levels of system reliability, quality and security of supply

    * Maintain and improve the existing services efficiently

    * Foster market integration towards European integrated market

What does 'smartness' imply?

Smartg rids do not only supply power but also information and intelligence. The 'smartness' is manifested in making better use of technologies and solutions to better plan and run existing electricity grids, to intelligently control generation and to enable new energy services and energy efficiency improvements.

What does 'smartness' NOT mean?

The smart grid relates to the electricity network only (not gas) - it concerns both distribution and transmission levels.

Smart grids are not new 'super grids'. They will not look significantly different to today's conventional electricity grids transporting and distributing power over copper and iron. However, smart grids will lead to improved cost-efficiency and effectiveness.

The smart grid is no revolution but rather an evolution or a process within which electricity grids are being continuously improved to meet the needs of current and future customers.

There will not (and cannot) be any 'roll-out' of smart grids, since such a roll-out is continuously occurring.

Although the concepts are sometimes confused, the smart grid is not smart metering - the smart grid is a much broader.

Source: www.smartgrids.eu