A Thousand Points of Light

For those of you who know me, you are aware of how I can quickly dive into the technical engineering details of power systems.? I have, however, set a challenge and a goal for my?“Engineering Transition” newsletter to communicate about all these complex engineering topics as clearly as possible – limiting the use of technical jargon and giving the context to speak to both engineers and non-engineers alike. Because, of course, the evolution of electricity and energy impacts us all.?We must join forces, starting with a common ground of understanding, to tackle the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.?

In this edition, I’ll offer my perspective about two of the greatest challenges and opportunities we face in how we plan, design and operate our grids: the incorporation of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the electrification of transportation and other sectors.

Distributed energy resources come in many forms. DERs could be your community renewable project, but also include what is called “behind-the-meter” resources and dispatchable loads.??For this discussion, behind-the-meter represents any power or storage to devices owned by residential, commercial, and industrial customers of electric utilities. Behind-the-meter devices produce power that the utility generally doesn’t own and,?in some cases, doesn’t know about or control.

What’s done with the power generated or stored by these behind-the-meter resources? There are a variety of examples:

• Residential solar rooftop panels to power a backyard pool in Arizona, with the rest of the homeowner’s electricity needs coming from the utility;?
• An onsite combination of a solar array and battery storage used to offset peak energy usage and carbon emissions for a data center;
• A small, efficient, natural gas/hydrogen generator that is used daily to offset the energy that a large chip manufacturer pulls from the grid, and can also provide backup power if the utility has an outage. The generator may transition to hydrogen when that becomes available, possibly coupled with locally generated renewable energy, as well.?
• A community solar project providing green energy to a large residential subdivision.

And what about electrification?? Electrification is currently our best foot forward to decarbonizing energy. When we think about all the sources of carbon emissions—vehicles, heating buildings, heavy industry, etcetera—many of those systems currently use liquid or solid fuels (natural gas, oil, gasoline).?Today, we have the technology to transition those systems away from fossil fuels through electrification, where we can?deliver cleaner electrical energy that powers our devices (water heaters, air conditioners, pool pumps) and our transportation (electric vehicles).?Of course, that requires adding more renewable energy resources to deliver the clean energy to power these systems and vehicles.

To add more spice to the equation,?most of the behind-the-meter power sources and devices produce electricity that exceed the needs of their owners. So, at any given time, they have excess power that they could, theoretically, sell back to the utility.?Virtual aggregation of this excess power is also taking place, where the output from thousands of these distributed devices is aggregated, bypassing the distribution utility retail system, and directly accessing the wholesale power markets to sell power there, or provide frequency support to the grid bulk system. When I say the “distribution utility retail system,” I mean the lower voltage distribution grids – power lines and poles that directly serve homes and businesses directly to the consumer. And a “wholesale power market” as well as the “bulk system” is the higher voltage, large transmission lines and power plants that serve multiple distribution grids, often across multiple states. This all rocks the boat in terms of balancing these "thousand points of light,” – millions of points, actually.?Big data, changed consumer behavior, changed electricity consumption patterns, and many stakeholders are involved.?

The consumer, once a very predictable user of electricity, is now a stakeholder in energy production and energy balancing. Traditional energy systems have been flipped on their heads.?

When you add electric vehicles (EVs) into the mix, as part of electrification, the situation becomes more interesting and more complex. Vehicles charging at home, unless under managed charging by the utility, likely get charged when owners get home from work, often during peak energy use hours, putting constraints on electric distribution grids.?Once charged, EVs serve as their own batteries, however, and could, in times of crisis, feed some of that power back into the utilities’ systems. In fact, that is already happening.?It’s well-documented that EV batteries have been used during recent electric outages as onsite generators.

The future state of the industry, in my opinion, is going to require load and DERs to be active stakeholders in balancing the grid just like bulk system generation resources currently do.

Utilities are transitioning from grids that have historically received their power supply from large power plants at the transmission level (bulk system) and served passive, predictable load (demand)?on the distribution level. Today, the utility is transitioning to a system that has thousands or millions of nodes (DERs or behind-the-meter sources)?that are generating or storing power, and unpredictable load patterns at the distribution and consumer levels. Utilities are accustomed to moving from an electric grid where power generating plants have had familiar names, “Big Bend,” or “Crystal River,” for example, and a dedicated utility engineer who knew those power plants intimately and individually. And now, we are moving to “millions of points” of generation and the merging of the transmission bulk system with the distribution and consumer sides. The transition has begun in earnest and there is no turning back. The seams have begun to dissolve.?

To assimilate these various resources onto distribution grids, it requires major rethinking of how we plan, design, and operate those grids. They were designed as “hub-and-spoke” systems – power flowing one way into homes and businesses. That approach was efficient, very reliable, and generally effective for about 100 years. It incorporated economies of scale from the bulk power system, which literally and figuratively flowed down to end-use customers via lower-voltage distribution systems.?

This huge machine has now been turned inside out with all these distributed, democratized electrons from behind-the-meter needing someplace to go.?Utilities must balance supply and demand (load) instantaneously, 24-7-365.?This new environment creates much less certainty about the ability of utilities to plan for both load and supply at the distribution level, and this uncertainty is already propagating to the transmission level (bulk system).?But all this also introduces great opportunities, if done right, to create a system that has the potential to be not only more clean, but more efficient as we move generation closer to the demand source – we eliminate “line loss” and other inefficiencies that occur when we need to send electricity miles away across transmission lines; it also reduces the need for otherwise massive expansion to our transmission and distribution infrastructure.

As my team and I learned when initially integrating large amounts of wind generation into the bulk power system, it’s critical to get the engineering right from the get-go and that requires quality data to, in turn, enable accurate planning.?The only way to get that information, at the granularity we need it, is to deploy technology.?Such technology can and does take different forms. Optimizing our grids to meet new customer expectations requires a holistic approach to planning, not just at the distribution level, but up to the transmission level – and back again, manipulation of massive amounts of data, and granular grid modeling for planning and operations.?

Even more important than getting the planning and engineering right, the mindsets of utility executives, distribution engineers, and the rest of the stakeholders as well must continue to shift to embrace a holistic approach to this new paradigm.?In future editions of this publication, I’ll get more into the details of the various technologies key to enabling distribution and transmission planning, balancing energy, and maintaining reliability and resilience. Thereafter, I’ll explore the mindset changes needed in the evolving utility and supporting workforce.

To be successful, however, we must be capable of thinking outside of the box. We must peel away and let go of the old traditional ways we designed power grids. Or, else, we will end up bandaging our way out of this—the consequences of which would be very expensive in more ways than one. I’ll also explain more on this point in future articles.?

Personal Corner, as promised:? Remember the little girl whose father rhetorically asked her “if only we can generate energy from the powerful footsteps of millions of people in the world?”? Yes, mind-provoking thoughts are key to innovation.?But a “beautiful mind” needs many elements to nourish it.? While math and physics were a passion for me and almost a hobby growing up, I also loved literature and wrote poetry. Sometimes poems would wake me up in the middle of the night, as if they descended from outer space, complete and perfect. And I would light a candle to write them.?And many a night I would find my dad on the rooftop of my grandparents’ summer house in the village by the sea, and ask him to recite the same poems from Edgar Alan Poe or Victor Hugo.?Later in life, however, and as I applied my energy fully to the path of electrical engineering, I found less and less time for pure literature and poetry, but it still comes back every now and then. I have a goal to rekindle that in the coming years and likely write a book about my journey. I’m stating it here as a shared promise so you, my readers, can encourage me and hold me accountable to act on that goal.