Siemens: Proactive Outage and DER Management

Digitalisation Solution or Approach: The case study offers an overview on how a modular, SaaS solution can be leveraged as a general approach towards grid digitalization, leveraging data and cross department workflows, to solve several use cases across departments, through a fast implementation.  

Objectives: Gridscale X™ LV Insights enable visibility of LV Grid to bring hindsight's to insights, and insights to foresight to better assess impact and better prioritize actions. Bringing benefits on efficiency and effectiveness across departments, ultimately leading to better operational KPIs (SAIDI, SAIFI), better allocation of capital and reduced costs. 

Context, Challenges, and Framework 

Industry Landscape: Norway has seen a tremendous growth of DERs and electrification requirements, very intense politics and public pressure to increase grid capacity, in order to cope with energy transition, and ever-increasing customers demand for new grid connections. However, grid capacity is slow to come into operation. The TSO will only deliver the required new capacity in the following 7 years. 

So the question that Elvia faced was, how to increase grid capacity and take the existing physical grid into its physical limits? Specially at LV level, where the grid has less sensors and is more capillar.  

Roadmap: 

In order to increase operation capability, Elvia needed more LV grid Insights and a better LV Outage Management capability, that could enhance capabilities already present on their ADMS solutions, and that could cope with the expected increase of the DERs penetration on the LV grid. 

According to Accenture’s framework this case study is under the DSO Activity “Operate – Operation Planning, Outage Management and Reliability” with a Digital Maturity Level of “Emerging to Advanced”. 

Specific Challenges Addressed: The lack of transparency, sensors and automation at the low end of the grid, led to various problems like: difficulty to understand load at LV level, difficulty to plan LV capacity and flexibility or equipment overloading at critical grid segments. All these problems were affecting customer service, and how outages were addressed, how they were identified and mapped into the grid and ultimately how to maintain informed Elvia’s customers. 

These dynamics were only bound to become more prevalent in the future since LV grid is increasingly playing a major role in the energy transition and decarbonization.  

Elvia decided to implement our solution Gridscale X™ LV Insights, to:  

• Improve LV grid data model, and therefore better electric connectivity model and grid topology. 
• Improve vision of grid state, by incorporating data from several departments (SCADA, MDM, CRM).
• Be more intuitive to use by all departments to work on it and extend it outside operations and its ADMS. 

Solution Overview 

Technological Definition: Gridscale X™ LV Insights is a software product specialised for the LV grid. It is adaptable and through its cloud architecture, easily scalable and quickly deployable, making it possible to create an operational LV grid digital twin. 

Solution Description: Gridscale X™ LV Insights is a dedicated SaaS for adaptable and scalable LV grid management. Leveraging existing data out of various sources inside the DSO IT/OT landscape. DSOs can create a digital model of the grid to monitor its status, optimize outage management, identify critical grid segments and share relevant insights across departments.  

Technological Components

SaaS based, modular solution that allows:  

Build LV grid model: Easily build and manage a digital representation of physical low-voltage grids. Domain experts leverage automation and visualization to create their digital model, integrating data from multiple sources, mapping smart meters to service delivery points, enriching parameters, and validating based on electrical consistency. The reliable grid model can be updated and used across teams with minimal effort. 

Monitor and operate: Complement day-to-day operations tools with the detailed low-voltage monitoring capabilities. With data from SCADA, meter data management, and IoT at DSOs fingertips, grid operators can reliably assess the grid state and speed up outage handling. They identify outage zones, proactively dispatch field crews equipped with the fault location and cause information and track their work from start to finish. 

Identify critical grid segments: Consider the full impacts of DERs for increasing usable capacity and streamlining interconnection requests. With the intuitive interface, grid planners can visualize, track, and gain insights on the development of critical grid segments. They make necessary enhancement decisions confidently based on capacity margins and limit violations. 

Implementation Details 

Phases: The solution provides a fast time-to-value for the DSO with an onboarding process being a matter of weeks. After a total of approximately 12 weeks, the product can already provide value by generating insights for the grid planner and operator. 

Stakeholders: Our use-case has positively affected customer service and operations department the most. Notwithstanding there are other departments that have benefited as well: 

• Planning: Faster assessment and decisions on new connections; Proactive and reliable investment planning 
• Grid Model Engineer: Clear geo-representation of the entire LV network; Scalable and cybersecure SaaS solution 
• Field Engineer: Reliable insights based on already existing data 
• IT: Reduced IT complexity; Reduced technical debts; Scalable SaaS software 

Challenges Encountered: A lack of necessary data or a lower than needed LV data quality can delay the generation of insights and of value provision. Siloed information between customer service and operations, and between operations and field teams. Lack of sensors on LV, and low capability of transforming meter and customer information into operational insight. 

Functionality and Users 

User Roles:  

• Customer support users are now much more confident on the information they have, they can provide a faster support and they can share much better information with customers.  
• Field crews have additional, up to date, valuable grid state information, such as switching cabinet topology, extending the control room information to the field.  
• Operations: better accuracy on handling LV events and activities. Accelerated greatly the outage resolution times. 
• Overall: cross department workflows increase effectiveness between customer service, to operations, to field crews. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

Efficiency and Reliability Improvements:  

Elvia has experienced the full advantages of transparency with quick time-to-value. It provided valuable insights for data-driven decisions, enabling to get the most out of every part of their grid, with striking results: 

• Up to 30% reduction of LV outage times by automatically identifying outages 

• • Indication of outage zones visualized in map for quick identification. 
  • Check of outage impact from Smart Meter to whole feeder allowing a clear view of the entity of the outage. 
  • Verify outage restoration through affected smart meters, outage cases and feeders. 
  • Improved SAIDI/SAIFI and reduced reporting efforts to regulators. 

• Up to 50% less model maintenance effort 

• • Intuitive grid model builder automates parts of the grid model creation and validation process.  

• Up to 25% better investment decisions 

• • valuable insights on critical grid segments to increase usable capacity. Improved planning accuracy and take investment decisions with confidence. 

User Satisfaction: 

• Customer Service: Increased customer satisfaction by better and consistent in-company and customer communication 
• Operations: control room operators can now perfectly understand topology status. Tracing grid topology from household to switch cabinet to feeder to substation. They can obtain all the benefits out of an always up-to-date, grid model. 
• Field teams: Enablement of intervention with additional info about outage cause & improved location information 
• Planning: Visibility of grid impact and margin to support request approval for DERs connection suited for non-expert users. Decision support for necessary grid enhancements based on capacity and limit violations combined in one view. 

Achievements: Elvia completely changed the way they handled outage management. They have changed the value flow. Now Customer Service (CS) can receive calls from customers and understand if the reason for a call is a planned or an unplanned operation, if there are other customers affected by the outage and how many and where the outage is located on the LV grid. CS can respond to customers' enquiries regarding planned resolution times. They can open an outage ticket or see the status of open outage tickets. 

It has been a change management tool, an entry point for LV grid management, building foundation for future DER management and flexibility capabilities. 

Lessons Learned and Best Practices 

Key Takeaways: Data is building the base layer of our solution. Start with incomplete but readily available data and addition of further data sources with time. Without the implementation of this solution there were multiple blind spots that the costumer was aware of or was not aware of. Elvia gained insights to define its future energy transition roadmap and better allocate CAPEX. 

Best Practices: Breaking up silos between departments has brought higher efficiencies, with a single source of truth and cross department workflows. 

Scalability: Being a cloud solution, it has been easy to scale to more use cases and to address bigger datasets, add more layers of operational data, enhancing the insights capabilities, on a positive feedback loop.  

Conclusion 

Summary: Gridscale X™ LV Insights has been pivotal to bring grid insights and has been a change agent to break information silos, integrating different teams under the same information. Furthermore, it enabled DER and LV grid management and has been an entry point for additional flexibility solutions.  

Actionable Insights: Democratization of data access, cross department workflows on same solution, across the organization, has enabled greater insights to every involved department, from customer service to outage operations, to field operations leading to better investment decisions and better operational KPIs.

“LV Insights X has been pivotal, providing us the reliable, data-driven insights in the low voltage grid needed to accelerate our digital transformation. With increased flexibility and comprehensive oversight, we now manage our low voltage system much more efficiently, maximizing usable grid capacity and getting most value from our existing infrastructure and data.”
- Erik Jansen, Head of Grid Operation, Elvia AS