Smart Grid - The future in Utilities
The importance to reduce their carbon footprint promotes the need to have diverse generation assets in the organisation's portfolio. These non-conventional energy sources in the portfolio assist in reducing the carbon footprint. However, these energy sources give rise to sustenance challenges as their generation is intermittent. At the end of the day, the utility is equally compelled to provide economically affordable and competitive energy services to the customer. This forces the utility to find the optimal mix of generation assets, manage their network's capability to manage potentially diverse new generation sources and most importantly operate and transition efficiently to a low carbon system.
In a nutshell, utilities are compelled to address the following challenges :
- Facilitate connection and operation of diverse generation sources including micro generation from customers
- Deploy and run assets optimally.
- Optimise and balance their power system's operation by forecasting energy demand for their wholesale and retail customers
- Provide transparency on goods and services and promote billing accuracy for services delivered to their customers
- Assist their customers in understanding their consumption pattern and saving their bills
- Focus largely in reducing the environment impact by exploring and investing in green generation options
- Securing customer confidence by delivering a reliable, secure and flexible service
Thus there is a need in the future to invest on a 'Smart Grid' that can intelligently integrate the events that impact all the stakeholders connected to it. This includes the generators, DNOs and DSOs in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure energy to the customers. In the long run, this smart grid is likely to gain predominance. Utilities are faced with a challenge to address the following questions as a part of their investment.
How to reduce carbon emissions through a balanced generation portfolio?
How to maximize your assets utilization?
How to Reduce Transmission Congestion?
How to improve quality and reliability of power delivered to your customers?
How to win your customers with innovative and economic tariffs?
How to Provide Evolved Service to Your Next generation Customers?
Over the next series of blogs, I will try to cover some of the solutions available to the above questions.
