Global Energy Thought Leaders Converge to Exchange Perspectives on Data, Dynamic Economic Dispatch, DERs and Value

Once the energy industry talked primarily about fuel. Now, with digital transformation, data is the main thing fueling our discussions. This message was loud and clear at our Digital Energy Executive Exchange (DEXX) in Paris earlier this month. We gathered global energy thought leaders to discuss the most pressing challenges facing the industry. One particular aspect that emerged as a major concern for utilities is data quality.

With data, it’s a case of rubbish in/rubbish out. You wouldn’t want to have a fantastic Rolls Royce running on subpar fuel. Similarly, users of GE’s Digital Energy solutions don’t want to run their state-of-the-art, innovative industrial IoT solutions on murky data. Good data has the power to transform the business and deliver value. We have to be extremely careful about data preparation, data capturing, and data cleansing.

Yet data was only one of the recurring ideas that bubbled up in our breakout sessions focused on important energy transformation challenges. Much information sharing centered on the need for Dynamic Economic Dispatch in markets with high renewables penetration. Participants shared that communication between generating stations and dispatch/trading is often manual and inefficient.

Adapting to Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) including solar, storage and EV’s continues to be top of mind for utilities, but now the discussions are focused on the practical realities of a more decentralized system. Attendees spoke in depth about distributed controls to improve renewables penetration, grid resilience, and utilization. Today, DERs are driving demand for a multi-objective optimization and control system — which doesn’t exist! Secure device management with auto discovery, registering, and provisioning will be critical to making this future system work at scale.

Attendees also discussed the need for full view of the supply chain, in terms of processes and data, lifecycle management, value estimated, and value realized following the execution of the digital projects. End-to-end Digital twins across the supply chain will contribute to ultimate real-time value.

Lastly, the importance of workforce readiness was highlighted. Whether utilities are hiring their own specialists or working with their digital platform suppliers to get training during transition, collaborative change management is required.

DEXX and the Future

In my role with GE, I am constantly out talking to utilities and hearing their ideas about digital innovation’s opportunity and value. It’s not that the DEXX conversation surprised me so much as it emphasized the universal need for robust, powerful systems that can connect new assets (microgrids, renewables, distributed generation, storage) and read accurate data on a consistent basis. We’re all working for a flexible, scalable, and modular solution. This is what simply SmartGrids is about.

The Paris DEXX event was our third face-to-face event since we launched the initiative in August of 2018. For us at GE, it was a great opportunity to bring utilities and partners together to join a trusted community. For those who didn’t attend the discussions, there’s a follow-up call debriefing session and we started a DEXX LinkedIn group at the end of 2018 (please drop me a line if you’d like to join for either). Next up, we’ll be inviting people to exchange innovations and think outside of the box at the GE Digital Energy User Conference in Bellevue, Washington in June. It’s sure to be another exhilarating discussion of digital transformation.