DER Drives Data Opportunities for Smart City Vendors

As Americans gear up for Memorial Day this weekend — the unofficial start to summer — experts mourn they should also repair for a season of power outages. That's according to this report, which notes that parts of the country are facing energy emergencies thanks to unpredictable weather and an influx of renewables. And it's not just the United States. Blackouts are happening daily in parts of Asia and South Africa. And the — The EU fears the same fate as it weans itself off from Russia's energy supply. But rather than turn away from green energy, cities are doubling down, investing in distributed energy resources. When you see widespread blackouts because of too much energy demand or some sort of equipment failure or whatever that might be, and why ever that might be, it's because the system is still too centralized. So the promise is distributed. energy resources is that you're no longer relying on that centralized point. Distributed energy resources, or DERs for short, are transforming our power system. They consist of renewables like wind and solar, and non -renewable generation like energy storage devices and electric vehicles. They all generate power and can send that power back to the grid with the help of an entire ecosystem of technology players. First of all, Whenever you're putting DER into the grid, you have to go through an interconnection process where the utility wants to understand the technology that you're putting in, make sure that it meets all the codes and standards that they have, and that they know how to model it in their system so that they can stress test whether the local grid can handle having your DER connected to it. So that's called the interconnection process. Once you're through that, typically there'll be some meters. et cetera, that they will have that's associated with that so that they can track what's going on on a real-time basis. And those metering solutions are getting smarter, as seen in the new Smart Grid chip by NVIDIA and Utilidata, a company that specializes in software for the grid. They've partnered with us to basically develop a software stack that will sit on top of our Jetson-based platform, which is a small GPU that can- sit at the edge, the chip at the edge will actually measure what's going on at the meter and what the pull is from behind the meter, as well as what's happening on the grid. And what that does is it looks for anomalies, right? What's happening that shouldn't be happening? And that might mean that you're going to have a failure or you have excessive draw or, you know, multiple EVs are being plugged in on the same street and all of a sudden could overwhelm the transformer. You don't have the time frame to get back to a data center, process that data, then send a notification to shut things down. You could potentially blow a transformer and then everybody's out of electricity. So what this will do is real time processing. And then basically you can actually create actions to slow things down, turn things off so that you don't overwhelm the system. Now, what's really interesting about this is the computing power that's now available within the meter. NVIDIA's Jetson AI. platform reportedly takes measurements tens of thousands of times a second and looks at the quality of the power flow and what might be interfering with it and through machine learning algorithms utility data software will understand that power flow in ways that go beyond traditional metering capabilities if if a tree's hitting a line between two houses right you're going to see a disruption in the current that you see on one meter versus the other and over time the machine algorithms will start to learn that that's a tree branch hitting against a tree between two houses and then the utility can send out their vegetation management team to come down and trim the trees before that tree happens to hit the wire in a storm and take down the electricity to the neighborhood it's clear that data is taking on a huge role of powering our energy future not only helping utilities to better manage electricity flow but der providers too Mark Higgins works with the energy storage provider, Redflow. So our battery systems can integrate with a whole range of third-party solutions on that front to get the customer the information that they need to help meet their objectives. You can have anything from a fairly low -cost management system that just provides basic functionality all the way through to AI -enabled solutions that can have predictive analytics and forecast ways. that customer's energy usage is going, where prices are supposed to be based on weather and all sorts of things like that, that can get pretty sophisticated. And some of those third-party solutions providing this data will likely come from smart city applications, like smart streetlights. They not only provide data on energy usage from the lights themselves, but may also have other sensors that detail information, like the weather, or they can serve as EV charging stations. It could be, I'd say from a utility standpoint, just better understanding of how and where people use energy from the grid. Utilities may infuse that data into software platforms called Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems, also known as DERMS. These platforms, like the one by M -Crest, use AI algorithms that take in data from grid sensors to track and better manage power flow. Plus, Derns plays a huge role in managing them. market. It does this by aggregating all DERs into one software platform where it can then perform analytics and tap into available revenue streams for DER operators. And Press plans to use its DERM solution to create revenue opportunities with DERs for a low -income housing complex. And those low -income houses have PV solar, they have EV charging, they have electric water heaters. So collectively, those homes become an aggregator of power. And so rather than just building a set of low income homes, what they've actually given is that given this neighborhood, this town, this is more of a town, you know, the option of reducing their energy costs, but also taking that net total, that aggregate back to the market and making money. So it's clear there's a lot of work ahead to transform our energy. systems, and the good news is it will require a lot of partnerships to make that happen. As a result, we're seeing non -traditional energy players enter the market, vendors that can provide connectivity, collect data, or even provide software platforms to aggregate and analyze that data. It's all important as we enter the green energy wave, and we'll continue to follow the development right here on Current Insights.