COULD ENERGY BE EASY? WELL, THAT DEPENDS…

The North American power grid may be one of the largest and most complex machines on earth. And that was before we started adding distributed energy resources or intermittent generation (e.g., solar and wind). Whether we are talking about Texas or South Africa, the transition to cleaner power sources is underway. “The markets have already spoken – we’re moving to renewables whether we want to or not,” noted Dr. David Treichler, Director of Strategy and Technology for Oncor Electric Delivery in Dallas, TX, during a recent conversation with members of POWER Engineers’ Technology and Innovation team. “Now, how can we integrate all this stuff together, and how do we get as close to plug-and-play for as many as possible?” That is the challenge we are faced with, creating a clean power grid while keeping it reliable and resilient.

With the need to meet future decarbonization targets and take power to the remaining 13% of the world, governments, utilities, and private developers are looking at renewable energy as the solution. That solution could be fairly easy for a small well planned microgrid application but adding hundreds or thousands of intermittent generators to existing grids is a lot more complex. One way that is being solved is by applying machine learning and data analytics like POWER Engineers is doing for some international utilities in order to improve network and load balancing. Every application of renewable energy has its unique issues to deal with.

In late 2021 we reached out to David Treichler to get his thoughts on electric grids, particularly in the context of the lessons learned through the evolution of the North American electric grid and how they may be applicable in emerging markets. It was a great conversation, and we are excited to share some major takeaways with you.

 All innovation starts with a clearly defined challenge. The electric grid in North America as we know it was designed to be all things to all people, providing as much power as you may want (within reason) whenever you want it. David shared a recent description he had heard “The electric system is like a church. It’s built to be able to handle the crowds that come in at Christmas and at Easter, but the rest of the time you go in the church there’s all these pews that are empty”. This ability adds a lot of complexity to our system which is needed for a very small portion of the year. Current trends have this changing with more adoption of demand response and load shaping. The discussion around electric vehicle (EV) charging is a great example. If loads could be more defined, less variable, then the complexity of a system to serve it goes down.

 It’s all about combining location and technology. When reflecting on the development of the grid David said “If you’re starting a brand-new grid…a lot of nations are moving toward more integrated resources. They’re looking at a way to make a grid system highly reliable with natural, renewable generation.” When you start looking at our current generation sources that does become pretty obvious -- hydro where you can have dams, coal plants strategically located between the mines and major loads, and so on. So what does this mean in today’s landscape? Not all generation is equal in all locations and when choosing we need to pick the best technology for the location both today and accounting for environmental trends which will be impactful in the future.

 Don’t make it harder than it needs to be. This seems obvious, but if you are developing a microgrid, adding solar and batteries to that generator you already have is pretty tempting. However, mixing older and newer technologies can add complexities in operation and impact reliability. Oncor, in order to better understand the capabilities of microgrids, purposefully did things the hard way with their experimental microgrid. “We have going on six years of experience with a grid in Lancaster, Texas,” David explained. “We had one engineer who spent anywhere from 25-75 percent of his time maintaining that system for those years. Having analog generators on site trying to interact with a digital system was not a good idea. We were constantly having issues we had to keep addressing.” Taking care to build a microgrid with newer compatible controls is more likely to result in a highly reliable, easy to maintain system to permanently serve isolated loads or act as a backup for sensitive areas.

 Public and private sector solutions. While the types of generation have expanded and the methods to move electricity around have evolved, they both still use land and financial incentives. The government has been essential in facilitating the build out of the grid and will continue being so domestically and for international electric grids. “Pretty much every transmission line is built somewhere you’ll need agreement from numerous landowners for the route to work,” David explained. “Knowing that government has provided a fallback mechanism by which land can be acquired helps facilitate productive landowner discussions and settlements which will be reasonable for all parties.” The industry had gotten a lot smarter about how projects are approached over time and applying those best practices, such as early stakeholder engagement, realistic visualizations, and environmental evaluations help create projects with which all parties are satisfied.

 As energy markets prepare for the future, intelligent community infrastructure is equally important as the source of the energy itself – which is one area where POWER is making strides to help our clients. We are working to study how energy infrastructure can be planned and developed to integrate power lines for more than just power delivery, but also many different technologies that can be enabled on poles, like widespread 5G communication and IoT Sensors. “POWER is helping to reduce the cost of deploying these technologies by having that common infrastructure,” Treichler said. “POWER and Oncor are looking to the future on how we can simplify the backbone of the infrastructure it takes to accomplish these routes to smart cities.”

The conversation with David was a great reminder of these basic principles and how they apply to the electric grid no matter where it is. We got a lot deeper into some of the trends and applications of new technologies in the interview than we are sharing here but will be posting about that soon.