如今，电网运营和商业模式正处在真正的转型期。因此，公用事业机构面临着不断变化的社会、商业和技术动态的压力。
咨询与系统集成机构BRIDGE能源集团发布了“2017年公用事业行业电网现代化调查”，这是该公司对电网现代化工作进行专项调查的第三年，主要调查电网现代化取得的进展和面临的挑战。今年的调查结果显示，北美地区公用事业公司的员工超过2万名，与2016年的调查结果相比增加了11％，其中公用事业公司制定了电网现代化计划，91％的受访者表示他们清楚地了解相关收益和目标成果。
“电网现代化现在是主流，是公用事业战略的积极组成部分，推动了监管政策和公用事业商业模式的广泛变革，并要求对新的实时技术和基础设施进行投资。”BRIDGE集团电网运营实践副总裁Mike Bianco说。“我们很高兴看到，公用事业战略目标与所需能力和有利技术的清晰映射，为利益相关者的整合和投资规划提供了明确的价值。”
电网现代化2017年BRIDGE指数公用事业行业调查还显示，84％的公用事业公司正在探索新的商业模式，而维持或提高可靠性是公用事业电网现代化工作的重中之重。
部署高级配电管理系统（ADMS）
BRIDGE集团表示，高级配电管理系统（ADMS）是使分布式能源（DER）集成和控制成为电网现代化的关键能力。ADMS的广泛采用以及互操作性的标准和监管政策的进步将有助于加速电网现代化。”
太平洋天然气和电力公司（PG＆E）在加利福尼亚州圣何塞的示范项目就是一个例子，旨在评估如何通过电网管理技术来控制和协调用户使用的太阳能储能和/或智能逆变器。
PG＆E正在寻求获得关于高级配电管理系统（ADMS）和分布式能源（DER）如何协同工作以提供高度分布式能源（DER）使用案例的解决方案的数据。
该示范项目的一个主要目标是评估分布式能源管理系统（DERMS）在多大程度上提高电网的稳定性和电能质量，以及随着越来越多的客户采用太阳能和储能来优化太阳能发电和电力系统潮流管理。
根据PG＆E公司的说法，“圣何塞的分布式能源（DER）示范项目是一个代表智能电网的形态，以及在未来越来越普遍的能源存储、智能逆变器、太阳能、电动汽车和其他分布式能源的一个缩影。为此，该项目帮助PG＆E了解安全可靠地运行未来电网所需的人员、过程和技术。”
BRIDGE集团的调查也表明，微电网是公用事业电网现代化工作的重要组成部分，这有助于提高一组客户（如馈线或变电站）的可靠性和弹性;整合分布式发电，以及提高关键客户的可靠性和弹性。
新的业务模式和电网分析
电网现代化不仅适用于新技术和资源的整合，也适用于创建新的业务模式和服务。
“公用事业公司正在探索各种各样的新业务模式。为了做好充分准备，公用事业公司必须清楚地了解目前能力的全部深度及其战略目标。”BRIDGE集团说。
公用事业正在探索的一些新的商业模式包括：
•提供不受管制的能源服务附属公司
•考虑创建一个提供不受管制的能源服务的企业
•试验分布式能源和/或微电网的实施和所有权
•开发成为分布式系统平台供应商或集成平台的能力
•探索从传统交付业务过渡到绩效管理
未来的数字电网将更多地依靠信息来提高电网可靠性、能源可承受性和客户选择。
BRIDGE集团指出，分析是发掘数字电网潜力的关键，并且必须成为任何成功的电网现代化战略的一部分。并指出，97％的受访者预计电网分析将因电网现代化的计划而增加。
影响电网现代化举措的顶级实施问题
根据调查的结果，影响计划和正在进行的电网现代化举措主要面临两个主要挑战，即：相关系统/数据的整合以及与当前系统/工具的局限性。
BRIDGE集团指出，大多数公用事业公司没有很好地记录或理解良好的数据结构、数据流程或数据治理。
“公用事业公司努力在企业数据模型中找到合适的位置，以便将物联网数据放在合适的位置。市场上只有大约一半的公用事业已经转移到面向服务的体系结构（SOA），可以很容易地集成物联网设备、服务和数据。传统的点对点和硬连线集成技术不能很好地处理异步。间歇。可变格式的集成。”BRIDGE能源集团表示，“在某些情况下，标准已经到位（IPv6，mDNS，AMQP等），但很多仍在物联网领域发展。目前具有足够的标准为物联网集成提供了良好的基础，然而，大多数公用事业公司在其组织内还没有定义，采用和实施成熟的标准（IPv6，IEC61850，CIM等）。因此需要实施强有力的标准定义、生命周期和治理流程，以便公用事业部门的技术社区能够就生产的用途、使用的内容以及即将到来的内容达成一致意见。”
对当前系统/工具的限制
数据质量：数据质量是隐藏在大多数传统系统角落的小秘密。随着时间的推移和连续更新、升级和更改，数据可能会变得不完整、脱节和不准确。
企业很少花时间来开发和实施数据质量、数据审查或数据清理应用程序/功能，以确保数据质量。对下游的影响是，其他传统系统的数据转发系统通过传递质量差的数据加剧了这个问题，并经常附加额外的数据。
•物联网系统有可能产生与传统系统相同的数据质量问题，但时间要短得多。物联网系统传统上很少由拥有实体，应用程序或供应商管理，因此数据有机会容易和频繁地被错误解读。
•现有的软件配置和管理工具集具有有限的功能，很难“接触”物联网设备。
这限制了基础设施和安全人员对物联网设备特性和性能的可见性。这也限制了他们管理这些设备及其性能的能力。随着配置管理工具集（Service Now，SmartFrog等）在这个领域的成熟，这个问题预计将会减少，设备所有者与设备服务的用户之间的合作协议将成为主流。
“系统集成和工具限制是阻碍电网现代化项目效益实现的最常见的挑战。利用与特定实用工具和跨供应商经验的资源，可以快速克服这些问题，达到预期的业务目标。”BRIDGE集团总结说。
Reliability remains top priority in grid modernisation efforts
26 December 2017
The electric grid operations and business model are in a state of genuine transition. As a result, utility organisations are faced with increasing pressure from changing social, business and technological dynamics.
Consulting and systems integration company BRIDGE Energy Group, released its 2017 Utility Industry Grid Modernisation Survey, marking the third year the company has surveyed utilities specifically on grid modernisation efforts, the progress made and the challenges they face. This year’s survey, reaching over 20,000 utility employees throughout North America, reveals an 11% increase over 2016 survey results, of utility companies developing a grid modernisation plan – with 91% of the respondents indicating they clearly understand the associated benefits and targeted outcomes.
“Grid modernisation is now mainstream and an active part of utility strategy driving a broad spectrum of changes in regulatory policy and the utility business model, and requiring investments in new real-time technologies and infrastructure,” said Mike Bianco, VP, Grid Operations Practice at BRIDGE.
“We are encouraged to see that a clear mapping of utility strategic goals to required capabilities and enabling technologies is providing clear value in stakeholder alignment and investment planning.”
The 2017 BRIDGE Index Utility Industry Survey on Grid Modernisation also revealed that 84% of responding utilities are exploring new business models; and that maintaining or improving reliability is a top priority in utility grid modernisation efforts.
Deployment of ADMS
Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS), says BRIDGE, are “enabling distributed energy resource (DER) integration and control, a key capability of grid modernisation. Broad adoption of ADMS, as well as advancements in interoperability standards and regulatory policy will help accelerate grid modernisation.”
An example is Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) demonstration project in San Jose, California, aimed at evaluating how energy storage and/ or smart inverters used with customer-sited solar can be controlled and coordinated through grid management technology.
PG&E is seeking to obtain data on how DERMS and the DERs can work together to provide solutions for high DER penetration use cases.
One major goal of the demonstration is to evaluate to what extent distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) technology enhances the stability and power quality of the grid as well as optimizes solar generation and power-flow management as more customers adopt solar and energy storage.
According to PG&E, “ The distributed energy resource (DER) demonstration projects in San Jose represents a microcosm of what the smart grid will look like and how it will operate in the future when energy storage, smart inverters, solar, electric vehicles and other distributed energy resources will become increasingly prevalent and seemingly ubiquitous.
“To that end this project helps PG&E learn about the people, processes and technologies required to safely and reliably operate the grid of the future.” Reponses to the BRIDGE survey also indicated that microgrids form a key part of utility grid modernisation efforts, which assists in 1) improving reliability and resilience for a group of customers (e.g. a feeder or substation); 2) integrating distributed generation and 3) improving reliability and resilience for critical customers.
New business models and grid analytics
Grid modernisation not only lends itself toward the integration of new technologies and resources, but also toward the creation of new business models and services.
“Utilities are clearly exploring new business models across a diverse range of options.
To adequately prepare, utilities must clearly understand the full depths of their current capabilities as well as their strategic goals,” says BRIDGE.
Some of the new business models being explored by utilities include:
• Affiliate company providing unregulated energy services
• Considering creating a business to provide unregulated energy services
• Experimenting with implementation and ownership of distributed energy resources and/or microgrids
• Developing capabilities to become a distributed systems platform provider or Integration Platform
• Exploring a transition to performance based regulation for our traditional delivery business
The digital grid of the future will rely more heavily on information to improve grid reliability, energy affordability and customer choice. Analytics is key to unlocking the potential of the digital grid and must be part of any successful grid modernisation strategy, says BRIDGE, noting that 97% of survey respondents expect an increase in grid analytics from and for their grid modernisation plans.
Top implementation issues impacting grid modernisation initiatives
According to survey’s findings, there are two primary challenges impacting planned and ongoing grid modernisation initiatives, namely: the integration of related systems/data and limitations with current systems/tools.
BRIDGE points out that most utilities do not have well documented or well understood data structures, data processes or data governance in place.
“They [utilities] struggle to identify the appropriate place within the enterprise data model that IoT data should be placed.
“Only about half of the utilities in the market have moved to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that readily enables integration of IoT devices, services, and data. Legacy point-to-point and hard-wired integration techniques do not handle asynchronous, intermittent, variable format integrations well,” says BRIDGE Energy Group.
“Standards are in some cases in place (IPv6, mDNS, AMQP, etc.) but many are still evolving in the IoT space. There are enough [standards] in place to provide a good foundation for IoT integration; however most utilities have still not defined, adopted and enforced mature standards (IPv6, IEC61850, CIM, etc.) within their organisations. A robust standards definition, lifecycle and governance process needs to be implemented so the technical community within utilities can agree on what’s used for production, what’s used for pilots, and what’s coming on the horizon.”
Limitations with current systems/tools
Data Quality: data quality is the dirty little secret lurking in the corner of most legacy systems. Over time and successive updates, upgrades and changes the data can become incomplete, disjointed and flat out inaccurate.
Rarely is the time spent to develop and implement data quality, data vetting or data scrubbing applications/functions to ensure data quality. The downstream effects are that other systems which relay on data from the legacy system exacerbate the problem by passing on the poor quality data and often attach additional data to it.
• IoT systems have the potential to create the same data quality issues that legacy systems do but in a much shorter timeframe. IoT systems are traditionally ‘less managed’ by an owning entity, application or vendor and therefore the data has the opportunity to be misinterpreted easily and frequently.
• Existing software configuration and management toolsets have limited functionality and ‘reach’ into IoT devices.
This limits the visibility that infrastructure and security personnel may have into IoT device characteristics and performance.
It also limits their ability to manage those devices and their performance. This issue is expected to lessen as configuration management toolsets (Service Now, SmartFrog, etc.) mature in this space and cooperative agreements between deviceowners and device-service-users become mainstream.
“Systems integration and tools limitations are the most common challenges impeding Grid Modernisation project benefits realization.
Leveraging resources with utility-specific and cross-vendor experience can quickly overcome these issues to achieve desired business objectives,” concludes BRIDGE. MI
来源：中国储能网
