March 20199 THE THREE DRIVERS SPEARHEADING THE TRANSITION TO AN ALL-ELECTRIC, AGILE ENERGY WORLD ARE DE-CARBONISATION, DE-CENTRALISATION AND DIGITALISATIONtransformers results in much greater flexibility from accuracy class and ratio perspectives. Adherence to IEC61850-9-2 and other related IEC standards also ensure inter-operability.The above infrastructure also enhances the ability to transport large amounts of data beyond the station control room to a central "data lake" hosting open, scalable platforms such as MindSphere to perform big data analytics, correlating data from multiple sources, thus creating the basis for OT/IT integration.At the distribution level, feeder automation helps in considerably reducing outage durations and revenue losses, improving the SAIDI and SAIFI reliability indices. The portfolio to cover vast geographical areas spanning across rural, suburban and urban networks would be a mix of solutions, ranging from high speed de-centralized, to semi-centralized ones at substation level and a centralized one at the control centre.OT/IT integration ­ typical use casesOutage Management is an ideal illustration where smart metering provides near real-time monitoring of outage status, allowing improved fault identification, especially on long radial lines in remote areas, as well as nested network faults in suburban and urban locations. The ability to enhance situational awareness with data that addresses fault identification and location, as well as information about crew availability and proximity to an event, helps to achieve considerable savings.Distributed energy resources (DER) integration necessitates network reinforcement to increase capacity. A traditional approach with reduced visibility into prosumer systems, leading to estimations on the size and timing of DER exports to the grid, is expensive. Alternative cost-effective solutions would be to incorporate DER output data into network planning, and use the output data to achieve real-time network monitoring enabling the grid operator to take actions such as curtailment of DER output, with customer consent to optimize grid stability.OutlookThe on-going energy revolution is changing energy trading mechanisms and several emerging technologies can make grid management smarter with edge computing and big data analytics.The transition towards digital grids offers several opportunities for utilities as they ramp up renewable energy sources and unlock the potential of grid data. Sector couplings and energy storage are getting increasingly relevant with digitalization as the key enabler. Digital substation services and artificial intelligence using machine-learning algorithms are leading to improvements in maintenance practices and asset management.
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