Stakeholders Eye Advantages of Smart Grid Edge Computing

“Expanding and strengthening our power grid means we can get Americans power where and when they need it most, and in so doing deploy the clean energy we need to reach our climate goals and ultimately bring down energy costs,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a statement. “With nearly 70% of the nation’s grid more than 25 years old, the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a pivotal catalyst for transmission projects across the nation.” 

The agency touted independent estimates that say the U.S. needs to increase electricity transmission systems by 60 percent by 2030, “and may need to triple it by 2050 to meet the country’s increase in renewable generation and expanding electrification needs.”

So far, so good. The DOE says investments in smart grid technology were $6.4 billion in 2018 and are expected to grow to $16.4 billion annually by 2026.

What Is a Smart Grid?

A smart grid is the melding of traditional power generation and transmission equipment with cyber innovations, including sensors, computing power, automation, advanced metering and control, and data management. What was originally a highly centralized operating environment becomes a two-way information stream with the network reporting back in real time.

According to experts, a smart grid makes transmission more efficient, allows quicker restoration, lowers operational costs for utilities (and theoretically customers) and increases the integration of renewable energy sources.

“A lot of these technologies can enhance reliability and respond to outages,” says Paul Zummo, director of research and development for the American Public Power Association. The group represents public electric utilities in 49 states and provides grant funding for next-generation pilot projects.

For example, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory used a grant to develop a tool to make it easier for utilities to connect residential solar panels to the grid. The City of Rock Hill, S.C., is using its grant money to help make fault detection more visible to repair crews to shorten the duration of power outages.

How Do Smart Grids Help State and Local Public Utilities?

Public utilities are fast installing residential smart meters, and a penetration rate of 90 percent is expected by 2030, according to the consulting firm Guidehouse. These devices do the standard tracking of electricity usage but also provide a data stream back to the utility, enabling it to monitor daily and hourly consumption. This is typically offered to customers on an online dashboard.

As StateTech has reported, many public utilities are sharing that information with citizens through mobile apps.

With smart grids, electricity service can be started or stopped without a technician coming to the house. For the utility, a smart meter provides valuable data on fluctuating energy use that is fed into power management programs.

The next step in the evolution is smart home appliances that talk directly to the utility company and can be modulated remotely to use less electricity when there is heavy demand on the grid. However, pushing smart sensors down to the household level has its challenges, says Ted Burhans, director of distributed energy resource technology for the Smart Electric Power Alliance.

“Utilities are very good at balancing load and generation,” he says. “From there, there are substation controls, and all these cascade down to transformers and understanding what’s happening there.”

The increasing oversight required at the appliance level causes heartburn. “As you cross over into managing a customer’s device, data is a huge challenge,” Burhans says, and so is privacy. “Where do you store it? Who uses it?”

EXPLORE: How the U.S. Department of Energy is working to protect the electrical grid.

How Can Governments Modernize Smart Grids with Edge Computing?

Electric utilities are conservative by design. The ultimate priority is keeping the power on. To that end, the use of edge computing is in its infancy in the sector.

“There’s some processing out with the nodes, but not a lot,” Burhans says. “Mostly, it’s handed back to the central system.”

However, recognition of the advantages of edge computing is growing. State and local government initiatives have shown fruitful results using edge computing when deploying video surveillance. With smart meters, predictive maintenance algorithms and outage sensors generating more data on the grid, experts know backhauling makes diminishing sense.

“If you transported all of that data to a data center, it would be enormous,” says Dan Madey, senior solution architect for Cisco.

A group of utilities has joined forces to develop a next-generation architecture called the Open Field Message Bus. It combines edge computing with traditional supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software systems.

Madey sees a twentyfold increase in nodes coming: “The edge will then synchronize.”

The New York Power Authority is already using in situ sensor analytics on its power lines where network or cellular bandwidth isn’t sufficient. “Moving forward, there will be a mix of cases where edge computing makes more sense than feeding raw data into a hub and creating new analytics centrally,” NYPA spokesperson Alex Chiaravalle says.

At the birth of the commercial internet, networking companies racing to lay fiber in the ground were fond of saying, “If you’re not scared, you just don’t understand.” Power utilities face much the same pressure. “The grid is going to need to produce and transport much more electricity than in the past,” Madey says.