In twenty-odd minutes, Thomas Kiessling outlined to an audience of knowledgeable Energy experts his seven points to help prepare an energy company to make a transforming change.

By using specific examples of the needs in Electricity and the Grid Edge to underline the changes needed to be undertaken, he “fleshed out” these seven steps by recognizing all the seven do need to be embraced collectively.

Thomas Kiessling is the CTO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, and within his keynote at the Enlit Europe event, held in Milan between 30th November to 2nd December 2021, provided seven needs for transitional change to prepare any energy company “As all of us will go through disruption and opportunity.”.

The primary point of his keynote I covered in a more extensive review here of “how to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption.”

Kiessling said the industry “has entered a much greater degree of uncertainty. And uncertainty needs entrepreneurs; it needs trial and error, and it needs system-scale innovation.”

Today as we transform our power generation into renewables, we face ageing powerlines, struggling to add capacity, a lack of (real-time) awareness, difficulties in controlling the voltage, especially at the grid edge. His examples were limited due to time but solely to illustrate the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of his seven needs.

Kiessling points out the challenges ahead where a seven-fold increase in renewables is projected with still the overriding number one objective of having the security of supply and resilience within the system being paramount.

The Seven Transition Needs to prepare as an Energy Company

Firstly today, the need is to apply cutting edge technology.

Transition need one: The security of supply, resilience, and automation

Using specific examples of where applying cutting edge technology will give this security of supply, resilience and automation.

Point One: Kiessling points out we will see less inertia and less short circuit power in the networks. There will need to be more sophisticated fault detection algorithms. Kiessling believes there is a need is to change the network protection architecture of the network itself. For example, the overcurrent and distance protection might need to be substituted by differential protections. AI technology will help to do this.

The good news here suggested by Thomas Kiessling is that AI and Analytics are well on their way to help in this transformation to control and operate the network in a “real-time” fashion. This shift in managing the system’s demands becomes a major transiting challenge.

Point two made here was shifting from static monitoring to a more dynamic setup. The present static load flow calculation to operate the network needs different thinking. As rotating masses are progressively removed, it will require different approaches with renewables towards a more dynamic data-driven environment.

Kiessling liked this, in an interesting comparison, to “resembling a patient-monitoring system during heart surgery” – one that was dynamic, self-healing and would evolve into a “system of systems”. This monitoring system needs to understand the system’s metrics in a real-time fashion to understand if dangerous situations are coming over the network to respond to these.

Point three– the need for self-healing networks. Closed-loop switching to help isolate and restore network segments in fast fashions and applies a different total fault metric to this.

The need comes to the point of a system of systems for semi-autonomous parts of the network, driven by renewables can then manage themselves and contribute to the overhaul resilience of the network, so it becomes a “resilient, decentralized and autonomous system”.

These transitions will need industry cooperation to mature these technologies and set all the energy systems up for the planned and expected growth.

As pointed out in the keynote- we all need to learn how to deal with data, and this is a cultural change where the need for data scientists, data lakes and IT/OT need to come together in new, radically different ways.

Transition need 2: Digitalization and Data

The challenge is validating and enriching the data to make it useable.

One example provided here is how Smart Meters are now going beyond just billing, but a deeper verification for providing data that increases the awareness of the network of power consumption, specifically on the grid edge. This shift enables improved metrics, planning and operational management for capacity planning, better aggregation insights, forecasting potential, ultimately improving the industry’s capital efficiencies and allowing the prosumer to participate.

Transition need 3: Innovation and proactivity

Kiessling’s example here was the use of power electronics; inverter-based resources will inform and stabilize the grid and protect the infrastructure.

The massive opportunities here are system-scale innovation and reinvention, yet there are three fundamental issues to tackle for shifting to inverters that need innovation and collaboration.

1. Inverters from different manufacturers require generic inverter models, enabling standardization to achieve a rotator-free network across the industry.
2. Challenge two: In more significant transmission scenarios, the inverters are located at a larger distance, increasing the risk of more weakly damped oscillations. Therefore, we need accurate simulation models and algorithms and present challenge
3. The issue of time-varying eigen modes is a challenge to be addressed. As the generation changes between conventional and inverter-based (or renewable) generation from hour to hour, the oscillatory behaviour of your power system will change, this requires an operator support system that continuously analyses the dynamics, and if needed, the power system needs to adjust on the fly to secure N-1 failure security.

One example offered within the keynote was operating, simulating and monitoring islands (actual physical islands) as rotation free, here Siemens has several larger-scale projects around the world.

In conclusion, to get to a rotation, free network in most countries calls for a system scale innovation for the energy community to work together to resolve and scale these specific challenges.

Transition need 4: Dealing with Cooperation at all levels

For example, TSOs and DSOs must cooperate more to cope with volatile inputs from renewables

Offered following the keynote to explain this cooperation point Kiessling gave a concrete example of how such cooperation can help speed progress to carbon-free networks:

With less and less TSO control of conventional power plants and rotating masses, the TSO’s mission to secure grid balance will be harder to achieve. The TSO has no direct control over RES at the distribution grid. That’s where DSO comes into play. The DSO can react to TSO control signals, effectively providing ancillary services by aggregating DER and DSR. This allows operators to reduce TSO side issues like redispatch, which has increased dramatically in some countries in recent years

In one of Siemens research projects cooperating with multiple TSOs / DSOs, this work has verified this works using actual network data of TSOs, and are now working on deploying this with several TSOs

Transition need 5: Standardization and scalability

The keynote comes back to evolving into this vision of a system of systems. The system will resemble more of a system of systems, where energy nodes will take autonomous decisions that contribute to overall grid stability, only possible with standardization among nano, Micro, distribution and transport grids.

Standardization matters because larger power systems will have many grid-forming inverters from different vendors. There is a need to harmonize cyber security standards to ensure a common level of cyber security for the entire interconnected energy system and cooperation between TSO and DSO for ancillary services and transport grid balance requires interconnection standards.

Transition need 6: Regulations for flexible investment plans

As pointed out by Thomas Kiessling we need a regulatory environment that builds digitalization into incentive frameworks. To build on this

We need to simplify data collection across the industry already at the point of asset registration and there need to be energy data best practices that are embraced by operators

To speed innovation, regulators should give grid infrastructure stakeholders (including equipment manufacturers) access to past operational data so they can model solutions. At present, the network operators often have a hard time getting innovation investments approved by regulators, even as research projects with part of the issues coming from digitalization investment, by nature, will lead to a certain amount of innovative trial and error, as is the case of every innovation.

Such an investment is in competition with simply adding hardware assets most of the time with a fixed rate of asset capital return. The regulator and the DSO understand this process much better. One way to evolve this logic is to start looking at business outcomes.

What is the asset base needed to deliver a given amount of energy? Capital efficiency incentives need to be introduced into the discussion. The flexibility to deploy Opex or Capex needs to be increased.

Here lies a cultural and transformational problem, as regulators have been “engrained” to approve and measure in a certain way, to apply known metrics or handed down-regulation requirements to safeguard energy.

You have to start with “what do we dare in the industry?”, “what do we focus upon?” and how can all involved in the energy transition collaborate, learn and work together.

Transition need 7: Consumer/prosumer focus

It is forecasted that Distributed Energy Resources will grow sevenfold by 2030. At a changing grid edge, data is (simply) not there, to prove that investment or change. How can this be changed? What help within the evolving grid edge can provide a change that allows for the transformation to take shape?

So, what if you could estimate the status of LV lines based on a combination of real-time data available typically at the substation level, plus meter data, even if you get that meter only once a day or periodically

Siemens is working with DSOs on pilots to use neural networks to estimate if and where voltage issues arise both on load and the DER supply side. These methods achieve better transparency, enabling the DSO to curtail less and authorize more new loads like EV chargers.

This information, combined with peak shaving, load shifting, storage systems to smooth out supply and demand, will go a long way to accommodate new loads and prosumer systems.

Thomas Kiessling’s suggestion is in the application of Neural Networks- “Achieving more informed decisions.”

The possible solution to make changes in the Grid Edge is to use substation data alongside offline smart meters. That data can be extrapolated to identify hotspots and load needs and becomes a Network Grid Edge.

This approach avoids having more sensors on every meter or connecting point to save time and expense. It can be pushed out over time and experience to connect into the final energy-consuming point.

This proposal made by Thomas Kiessling can provide a more apparent determination of the grid edge’s state and provide the state of the LV network for more informed decisions and (more targeted) capital investment.

So here, innovation and creative thinking are being applied to solve a current problem holding back the needed Grid Edge shift to the intelligent use of consumption and demand data. Insights gained will improve the knowledge on the network without deployment at scale of sensors to provide an assessment of data close to demand.

So, in the conclusion of Thomas Kiessling’s Keynote.

We are in a disruptive phase; Kiessling provided a transformation list of needs to follow in his keynote, specifically working through issues and challenges in the transmission, distribution, and Grid Edge networks. He gave many rich examples that are already shifting Energy and Grid Edge design. These offered radically different ways to manage the demand and supply, reflecting the changing nature of power generation, distribution and grid edge supply.

Thomas Kiessling’s final comment was the need to “wrap our minds around it” to undergo such a disruptive time of profound system change. It is how the energy community comes together and finds ways to imagine, collaborate to learn and share.

I found the suggestion of each Energy Company working through these seven transition needs (or evaluations) as a convenient starting point to bring the changes needed into a suggested “collective” whole to manage the energy transition in each company.

A more comprehensive review of the keynote is here.