Building the control room of the future: here’s how utilities can make progress now

The grid is facing a period of immense disruption. Rising distributed energy resource (DER) integration, intermittent generation from renewables, and frequent weather-related outages combine to place a huge strain on distribution utilities.

How can your utility navigate such a complex and volatile future? It all begins in the control room. It’s a topic we covered in-depth during a recent webinar, where our industry experts discussed:

• How grid challenges are shaping the needs of the control room.
• How a modern control room can transform grid operations.
• The role of technologies like AI and machine learning.
• Key steps to creating a modern control room within your distribution utility.

Listen to the webinar to hear the full conversation and keep reading to get the key takeaways.

Given the array of threats facing the grid, utilities need to rethink how the control room operates. This requires modernization, including redefined job roles, smarter processes, and advanced new technologies which, in combination, help to handle vast amounts of data and improve decision-making.

With that in mind, here are some fundamental places where utilities can start:  

1. Respond proactively. 

As the grid becomes increasingly unpredictable, the control room must become more proactive. Using solutions such as an Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), control room operators can access situational awareness workflows that provide real-time insights into the status of the network. In turn, this can help them rapidly prioritize and respond to critical issues, from mechanical faults to power usage problems.

2. Decentralizing the control room. 

Experienced control room operators are in short supply and it’s hard to attract and train new ones. But utilities can address this issue by decentralizing how they work. For instance, creating a mobile team (comprised of operators and field crews) can help redistribute control room responsibilities to address staffing shortages. Control room resources may need reinforcements when dealing with a large event – decentralization means that your field crews can tap into control room capabilities as well, thus vastly increasing the size of your workforce. 

3. Protect against future threats.

As extreme weather events become more frequent, control rooms need to be fully prepared for disruption — and a comprehensive disruption preparation and management suite is critical to this. The best software suites offer solutions for the before, during, and after of disruptive events. For example, prediction capabilities can determine a storm’s likely path of destruction and what parts of the grid are most likely to be impacted. During an event, an Outage Management System (OMS) can provide operators with the complete visibility and control needed to identify outages using rapid data analysis. And a recovery management solution can help utilities efficiently deploy field teams to speed up restoration efforts.

4. Enable T&D coordination

Managing renewables at scale involves integrating both the transmission and distribution sides of the modern utility from a real-time and a look-ahead visibility perspective. Managing today’s multi-directional energy flows across T&D can only be unlocked via a control room that can span both traditionally siloed divisions.

5. Navigate DER complexity

For utilities, rising DER integration creates significant complexity. Utilities with DER-heavy grids must contend with a host of challenges, including backfeeds resulting from excess generation, and violations resulting from masked loads. To handle these types of scenarios, the distribution control room needs advanced DER control capabilities integrated into its ADMS. This integration eliminates the need for two separate control rooms (i.e. one for ADMS and another for DER control) and makes it far easier to proactively address the impact of DERs on the grid. 

6. Integrate automation

As the grid modernizes, decisions must be made and actions taken in near-real time – much faster than any human is capable of. Thus, distribution control room operators should have access to AI and ML capabilities that unlock use cases like closed-loop automation, techno-economic optimization of DERs; Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR); and others. With automation, distribution control room operators can resolve challenges as quickly as they occur (or in some cases, before they occur!).

You can’t create the control room of the future without a clean and accurate network model. An inaccurate model can create bad or incomplete data and inaccurate DMS and OMS applications. This can lead to a host of problems, including inaccurate power flow that could impact accuracy for any DMS application. 

As part of a modern control room, utilities also need to deploy advanced technologies, such as analytics, AI, and machine learning in their applications. These can support powerful use cases, such as accurate outage predictions, simulations, scenario analysis, and automated grid management.

However, adding advanced new technologies and applications can be expensive, complex, and time-consuming. To make them viable, utilities need a way to bring down deployment costs and reduce time to value. Which is where GridOS® comes into the picture.

Building the distribution control room of the future is essential for all electric utilities. The challenges and opportunities we’ve described simply can no longer be dealt with using traditional control room processes.
 

To find out more about building a modern control room, including how GE Vernova’s ADMS can support that modernization, take a listen to our dedicated webinar.