The Energy Transition boosts renewable energy production. Consequently, many consumers will become prosumers who not only consume but also produce energy. In addition to distributed energy production, the structure of electricity networks will be made more complex by the electrification of transport and the increasing charging needs for electric vehicles. The need for electricity utilities to have more detailed, real-time situational awareness regarding the state of the network is growing rapidly.
So what is the aim of improving situational awareness? Society is increasingly dependent on electricity and consumers expect uninterrupted access to high quality electricity. The main objective of situational awareness is therefore to ensure the quality of electricity supply and to prevent outages and damage to the network.
Distribution management system tirelessly analyzes real-time network state
Distribution state estimation provides the utility with continuous real-time visibility of the state of the electricity distribution network.
How does it work then? SCADA and smart meters feed measurement data from various devices into a real-time model, which is tirelessly analyzed by the distribution management system. If any calculation result is outside the acceptable range defined by the utility, an alert condition is triggered.
What will distribution management require in the future?
The future distribution management solution needs to support real-time measurements in analyzing the network state. This increases situational awareness by producing an assessment of the network safety and performance in real time. Very importantly, it also needs to predict the near future.
In addition, assistive automation will be required to improve the user experience. This means that instead of providing a lot of information to the user, the future distribution management solution would shift to providing suggestions on what to do next and how to do it. And, of course, it also needs to provide the tools to implement these suggestions.
The future solution brings together all the information available from different sources. It supports network monitoring with comprehensive analysis and enables the network to be operated efficiently and safely. Furthermore, it will allow you to make the most of the investments you have made in the electricity network also in the future.
