Digitizing the electric sector is well under way, power execs say
The New York Power Authority (NYPA), the nation’s largest state public power organization with more than 1,400 circuit miles of transmission lines, has transmission cables that connect Westchester County to Long Island located underneath Long Island Sound.
The 660 AC lines have been hit by ship anchors twice over the last five or so years, Gil Quiniones, NYPA’s president and CEO, said last week during a Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) event in Washington, D.C.
“So we developed a digital system that tracks all the vessels in Long Island Sound and they get a ping–‘Hey, you’re getting too close! You’re on top of our cables! Don’t drop your anchor!’” Quiniones said about NYPA’s cloud-based, dynamic data analytics.
Meanwhile, Chris Crane, president and CEO of Exelon Corp., said the energy provider’s digital tools include video technology that can travel into high-temperature, high-radiation plants and relay data back to the engineers who are sitting off-site in a temperature-controlled environment. And instead of customers calling to say their power is out and then Exelon trucks driving up and down residential streets to find downed wires, data flows in via digitized systems that allows engineers to anticipate problems, for instance, or manage a system using smart switches.
“Who would have thought a couple of years ago that a utility would have data scientists on staff helping them with all the data that was coming in?” Crane said.
But that’s the new digitized power sector, or what BPC President Jason Grumet referred to as the ongoing “collision between engineering and communications.” It’s also known as the industrial internet, which Steve Bolze, president and CEO of GE Power, said “will have the biggest impact on the industry going forward over the next 50 years.”
“Customers are beginning to see the benefits of digitization now,” Bolze said.
The quantitative benefits total $1.3 trillion in value that could be unlocked in the digital space in energy by 2020 and up to $10 trillion by 2060, said Bolze, citing reports from the World Economic Forum.
The 2016 global market for smart grid technologies—including sensors, management and control technologies, communication networks and software—was worth almost $81 billion, a roughly 29 percent growth over 2011, according to the Intel Corp. 2015 white paper, “Digitizing power utilities: Business transformation driven by advanced analytics.”
“We’re getting data like we’ve never had it before,” said Crane. “We’re anticipating component failures versus sending the trucks out after the transformer explodes—we get the transformer changed out before the degradation gets to that point, so it’s very impactful on driving efficiency.”
That’s important because it’s a tough market in the energy sector right now, Crane said, and as a customer or merchant, utilities have to take a look at every opportunity they have “to maintain the highest levels of safety and reliability, but then do it at the most cost-efficient methodology.”
And, added Quiniones, it takes two years to get a new transformer if it explodes or catches fire.
Benefits bring challenges, too
With the benefits of end-to-end transparency of distribution and transmission providing utilities and operators with better insight on grid performance and customer behaviors, there also are challenges associated with gathering and securing data from a wide array of sources and “also to make sense of a wide variety of structured and unstructured formats,” according to Intel’s report.
Cybersecurity is the biggest concern, the panelists agreed.
“It is the top topic. Cyber and cyber attacks is the world we live in and it’s not going to change,” said Bolze.
The industry must remain reliable, affordable, sustainable and safe and GE Power has had to beef up on it, he said. “When events happen, you’ve got to get on them immediately. We’ve learned from customers so far that customers putting data on a purpose-built cloud is more secure than it being on their own in-house system,” Bolze said.
Quiniones and Crane agreed cybersecurity is a matter of risk management.
“In our sector we have to continue to be vigilant. The threat is constantly changing and we have to stay up on it,” Crane said.
Another major challenge is hiring and maintaining an industry-wide educated workforce, the execs said.
“We’ll need more technicians than electricians” at NYPA going forward, Quiniones said. “We hope the millennials will find the industrial internet as cool as the consumer internet.”
Crane said that the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs at state colleges must continue to be advanced to ensure a pipeline of future workers exists. He’s concerned that the U.S. government isn’t aligning the education system with the nation’s ongoing technological needs.
“We continue to talk about bringing back jobs but we’re still importing labor to handle the technologies that we have. Until there’s a much larger assessment of what the future worker competencies need to be it is concerning,” said Crane.
Exelon, Crane added, is toying with replacing several back-office tasks in accounting and human resources, for example, with automated, cheaper technologies versus human bodies. “We owe it to our customers to do it if we can,” he said.
