Renewables and the Smart Grid

Dave Roberts explains the need for the integration of large amounts of intermittent resources.

Wind power is a great renewable resource – the fuel is free; environmental impact is low; projects deploy quickly and harmonize with agricultural land-use. They generate power, local jobs and tax revenue. Enter solar power, again a great renewable resource with minimal environmental impact, quick-to-build projects, no water consumption, and its significant scalability from residential rooftops to mega-mart rooftop power plants.

These two do have one major impediment: they are intermittent. This can cause nightmares for the utilities responsible for reliability, and for keeping power flowing and balanced for everyone connected to the grid.

The smart grid will enable greater exploitation of such renewables, satisfying our political will and best interests and shifting energy consumption away from imports.

Time horizons play a major role in integrating renewables. Multiple forecasting techniques and service providers utilize long-term data resources in combination with statistical and numerical prediction models to estimate the wind and solar resources at various time horizons, including persistence, hour-ahead, day-ahead and so on. Augmenting these prediction models are offsite real-time observations from met stations feeding real-time data to the utility and the forecasting model(s). Using this information, wind and solar farms can send forecasted production data to the host utility. Leveraging the smart-grid, the host utility can push this information to the transmission system operator, the local utility, and industrial and residential consumers such as XCEL’s SmartGrid City program.

This data flows from the fuel source (wind and weather) through the generator, the high voltage transmission grid, the local distribution grid, the smart meter, and ultimately to the user interface, such as the smart thermostat. Using this information flow, the end-consumer can make informed decisions about when and how they use power. The host utility also has an option to intervene if consumer behavior is non-responsive to price and or type-of-electricity signals. When the wind blows strongly in Wyoming, it might be time to send a signal to charge plug-in hybrid vehicles. Inversely, if no wind is predicted for four hours, the utility may request/force consumers to forestall or turn down appliances, such as adjust the thermostat by one degree or delay running the pool pump.

This data flow is not one-way. The smart grid-enabled utility has enhanced visibility and control coming back from the industrial and consumer level. An example is microgrids to enable integration of large amounts of intermittent resources, both inside and outside the microgrid. (A microgrid is a collection of generation sources and loads that can be isolated seamlessly and bumplessly from the main grid and reconnected as needed, while being controlled internally and sometimes generating its own energy, including from renewable resources.)

OSIsoft has a role in tying together renewable energy, the smart grid, microgrids and consumers:  OSIsoft makes the PI System. The PI System is a real-time information infrastructure that ties together all sources and users of real-time data, from the meteorological data at the front-end all the way down to the smart-meter data management systems at the consumer level. Key elements of the PI System make it uniquely qualified.

It is secure and reliable, as well as being proven and scalable. PI delivers a highly available infrastructure, with multiple levels of redundancy and failover, architected to satisfy evolving NERC CIP Standards and security requirements.

In addition to its global partnerships with key technology vendors, such as Microsoft and SAP, OSIsoft maintains key relationships with leading global integrators such as IBM and Accenture working in smart grid and renewables. Partner ecosystem is therefore another key element.

The PI System is also rapid and has a sustained creation of value. As a packaged product, the PI System is quick to install, deploy and immediately begins collecting data and delivering value. It consolidates real-time data from across the utility – met data, generator, transmission, smart-meters, microgrids and so on – into actionable information.

The system is also sustainable and flexible. One of the core values of PI is the ability for end-users to configure the system to present meaningful (to the user) information to the right-user at the right time.

Dave Roberts is the Group Director Business Development of OSIsoft. He joined OSIsoft as Director in May 2005. Today, as OSIsoft’s Director for Business Development, he manages OSIsoft’s various vertical industries, including power, transmission & distribution, oil & gas, metals & mining, and other process industries.