Getting an Aging Grid (Retro)Fit for the Electrification of Everything

I'm in #SanDiego #California with Vutility at #Distributech23 this week and it's incredible to see the rapid developments in #electrification, including the growth of #vehicletogrid (#v2g), #energystorage, #virtualpowerplants (#vpp) and more. However, much of our #electricalgrid is aging and fragile, and without finding cost-effective, scalable retrofit solutions the challenges will become even greater as more volatility and loads are introduced over the coming years.

How ready is the "modern" grid for the changes coming? Here are a few interesting facts to consider:

• Over 70% of the U.S. transmission and distribution infrastructure is more than 50 years old, past it's designed life span
• The AVERAGE (mean) age of transformers on the U.S. grid is 35 years old, (at or beyond the targeted lifecycle)

In many ways, California has been leading the advancement of new technologies. The state has more solar generation and EVs on the road than any other in the country. However, managing all of the emerging dynamics affecting CA's grid is difficult. Not the least of the issues are wildfires, often causing $10B+ in annual damage, as well as significant health and safety concerns.

In recent years California wildfires (primarily caused by grid faults) have produced more carbon dioxide than all of the state's electricity generation, creating 2x more in new CO2 than all electricity emissions improvements from 2003-2019 reduced.

Given the scale of the issues with aging and strained infrastructure, extending the duty cycle of existing assets is critical. Cost-effective and scalable, long-range, real-time remote monitoring solutions could go a long way to solving these problems by enabling heat and outage maps at a substation or even transformer level. This would provide distribution companies with additional insights for both real-time optimization and grid management, as well as infrastructure enhancement planning based on congestion points in the grid.

Separately, active pole-to-pole ground fault monitoring along transmission and distribution lines could provide utilities with precise locational data to identify line breaks and immediately dispatch emergency services before wildfires have the chance to spread over large areas.

There are a variety of offerings in the market capable of providing these types of insights, but total cost of ownership often makes these prohibitive investments for regulated utilities. Vutility's HotDrop product line provides a safe, rapid install alternative. With patent-protected non-intrusive, self-powered (energy harvesting) design, the HotDrop can provide real-time visibility on medium and high voltage applications leveraging the long-distance coverage of the #LoRaWAN IoT communications protocol with exceptional 99.8%+ accuracy (exceeds all revenue grade certification standards).

A utility in Mexico recently installed weatherized HotDrops to audit electrical meters suspected of tampering. While some meters matched nearly exactly to the values reported by the HotDrops, others were reporting significantly less usage, clearly indicating that some of the meters were being tampered with.

With significant cost of ownership reductions compared to alternative technologies and real-time data available via API, HotDrop provides a unique opportunity for grid operators to enhance their visibility into grid asset performance, congestion, outages, and ground-faults. To learn more, contact Vutility's sales team at [email protected].