The Final Stage of Energy Distribution

The LV grid or the low-voltage grid is know as "the final stage of energy distribution." This is also what is commonly known as the grid edge. The final stage of energy distribution... 

How lucky I am to have friends who are such incredible photographers!

Photo taken by my friend Alex Atwater, of www.alexanderatwater.com, of an incredible pylon in South Africa. I was so happy and grateful when he sent it to me - you can check him out on Instagram at @alex_atwater_ 

PRO-sumers

The way we consume electricity is changing. As a result of this, we need real-time monitoring the maintain the quality and the reliability of the grid. We need to monitor and manage the grid edge in real time.

Or as the DI article says: "'there is a need for visibility and control at the grid edge because of the evolving sophistication of how consumers are using electricity.'" 

And the man quoted says that "that's [what's] lacking in the systems that exist today."

We as software companies need to help utilities to enhance their grid metering processes, enhance their data collection processes, and enhance their data quality.

We are now prosumers of electricity. There are fewer and fewer people who are just consumers. More and more of us are prosumers. We have solar panels on our roofs. We have wind turbines at home. We have heat pumps. We have electric vehicles which can feed electricity back into the grid. In order to better support these prosumers, the electricity world needs to have better software. It needs to have better applications.

Again, that is a big part of what we are doing at work. We want to supply energy suppliers and other energy SASS tech companies with better software.

We want to connect consumers with their power sources. We want to better connect consumers with their networks. We want to connect PRO-sumers with their grids. Thank you. With their magical magical grids. 

Their magical, magical grids. 

Thank you.

Why is it important to support prosumers?

Well apart from what I have said above, engaging prosumers in the grid edge management process, partly through their engagement via data collection from them, hopefully through good applications, can help to support the demand management and support the optimisation of the grid. I am so excited to find out more about the optimisation of the grid. Having the right amount of data on consumers' energy production and the right quality of it can help manage the smart grid - it can stop it from being overloaded - it can help us to know how much energy we need to product at a mass scale and it can help us to know how much energy we can expect to be produced from domestic properties. 

Looking at the new article again

Thank you.

DER's are getting cheaper. As mentioned above, their increasing presence is going to increase the complexity of the grid as we are now going to have to be looking at two way flows of electricity - we have to look at the potential of a possible risk of overload if people try to export too much electricity to the grid edge - we have to know and predict and rely on how much electricity it is that people are going to produce individually if we want to maintain the grid supply. 

Why is this? Because with the demand for electricity set to increase by 3x, we are going to need to know how much of this demand we can rely on DER's for - and how much of it we are going to need to generate and export from large power stations.

The tech space is opening up for new opportunities for grid edge management tools.

However: "there is a huge disconnect between the potential of these new technologies and our current systems setup." Once again the article linked above says in what I believe is a truly brilliant sentence: "there is a huge disconnect between the potential of these new technologies and our current systems setup."

Our hardware is affordable. Our hardware is mainstream. But we lack the technology that we need to fully harness the power of this hardware.

We also need to de-risk our hardware - for example, the electrification of transport is likely to create significant pressures on the grid edge.