"GREEN TRANSITION" and grid operation challenges,there will be learning and fixes as we gain experience but are we learning from other's experiences?

Green transition involves a major shift in the way grids are planned and operated. There have been transmission corridors being implemented to enable areas which are power houses of green energy to feed load centers, these are inter-regional and even cross-country interconnections, technologies that are proposed to ensure needed flexibility, that can aid the system that have reduced stiffness, operational practices and tools that can help.

As many countries progress in this "green transition", it’s extremely important to learn from countries which have progressed and assess preparedness in countries that have either just started or have made good initial progress with large scale RE integration and substantial DER's.

Even for countries which have progressed, few operational challenge are still unfolding. An advanced network like UK had its learnings as recent as Aug’2019, (ESO must have been aware of possibility, but probably not sure if this can happen) kind of catastrophe that large nos. of DER's getting disconnected due to operation of loss of mains protection can cause, way it can aggravate the issue beyond control and be one of the reasons for Aug'2019 blackout. ESO probably did not have much visibility of majority of DER’s, loss of mains was somewhat not adequately “adapted” to possibilities. Post this, there are schemes getting implemented in national grid to ensure that loss mains protection does not lead to a situation that aggravates already critical grid situation and DER's are made to assist in grid stability to the extent they can and should.

While this incident had lessons, but even before this, these countries had a well established practice of power quality measurements that gives important electrical parameters and trends thereof for analysis and planning. It's a changed grid situation wherein much higher degree of uncertainty is there, both on load side (STLF) and generation side (renewable forecasting), earlier it was mostly only on load side.

Seeing this in perspective of some major developing economies like India and most of South East Asia; as of now we have many states in India that have grown to have > 25% RE and significant DER's, but information available as to how over the years inter-state and inter-regional flows have been impacted, how these flows have started to fluctuate during a running day or for that matter how is situation with respect to interconnects, how has the power quality been impacted in network, how much info is available with SO's about DER's, how are DER's behaving in contingency, all these are extremely limited or not there. Add to this, just implemented renewable forecasting and scheduling mechanism has not matured enough.

We can learn from experiences in other countries which have moved much ahead and implementation of power quality measurements in networks is one such practice, early we do it, better it is...

#greentransition #powersystem #gridoperations #powerquality #renewableenergy #distributedenergyresources #distribution #transmission