Frost & Sullivan Global Transmission and Distribution Grid Analytics Industry Report: GE Digital wins Best Practices in Product Leadership Award

GE Digital’s industrial software accelerates the energy transition by making power-generating assets more efficient and the electric grid more secure and resilient. Innovating with urgency to anticipate  industry disruption and co-collaboration with customers and partners to meet the most pressing industry needs are two reasons GE Digital received Frost & Sullivan’s Product Leadership Award based on research from their ‘Global Transmission and Distribution Grid Analytics Industry’ Report. GE Digital is honoured to receive this award. This placement confirms our leadership position and highlights our continued innovation focus in delivering breakthrough business outcomes with new products and solutions that serve ever-evolving customer needs.

Recipient of Frost & Sullivan Product Leadership Award

Frost & Sullivan - a leading industry analyst and research firm with 60+ years of energy experience and insights independently evaluates vendors based on product suitability and business impact across a number of technologies. Their Product Leadership Award recognizes those organizations that deliver the best quality, reliability, and performance in the industry. F&S recognizes those companies continually at the forefront of innovation and growth and are best placed to deliver solutions effectively to meet their industries' rising challenges and opportunities.

Accelerating your time to value

Data can unlock valuable insights on improving grid operations further, be it through the more efficient delivery of energy from generation to the end customer, better planning of capital investment, or even near real-time guidance on how to triage and navigate restoration activities in severe weather events. Today, the utility industry is leveraging a tiny fraction of operational data – it’s generated for a specific use and then relegated to a box somewhere in a remote office, rarely to be seen again. It’s not that the data is unusable, but it requires very specific expertise that spans both domain and software to unlock its potential and drive actionable insights.

GE Digital engineered its Grid Analytics portfolio to make powerful analytics accessible to all. Leveraging our AI/ML-based analytics on top of a utility’s current operational software helps move the needle on hyper-critical goals for electric utilities, moving from a reactive state to a proactive state through advanced analytics. Outcomes delivered include minimization of customer downtime via outage prevention and reduced time to restore when outages occur. This capability improves customer satisfaction and ensures greater control over operating costs for our utility customers.

Vegetation management and visual inspection

Today, global T&D utilities spend millions of dollars per year on vegetation management and asset inspection programs to reduce outages, increase compliance, improve safety, and reduce the probability of catastrophic events such as wildfires or major regional outages.

Visual Intelligence is AI/ML based and offers optimized vegetation encroachment and asset inspection, delivering up to 20% reduction in vegetation trimming O&M, up to 90% improved data processing productivity, and up to 30% reduction in tree-caused outages.

Avoid blackouts and increase renewables penetration

Transmission grid operation is continuing to grow in complexity due to growing volumes of variable renewable generation, leading to a massive displacement of “system inertia,” or the resiliency of power generation.  Spikes in demand or reduced supply can cause unforeseen impacts to inertia and frequency stability.  Given this massive influx of renewables, solutions requiring enhanced system visibility and understanding to deliver fast-acting response services are critical. 

Effective Inertia predicts the effects of rotating assets and generator controls to prevent potential blackouts and increase renewable utilization, resulting in increased network resilience, reduced curtailment fees and penalties, and lower frequency response services.

Predictive storm planning

Weather is one of the leading causes of outages in distribution grids, with major disruptions from storms increasing over the past several years.  In today’s digital world, utilities can manage these impacts and move to a more proactive approach using predictive analytic technology.

Storm Readiness leverages weather and outage history data to forecast the impact of storms accurately. Resulting in improved storm CAIDI, minimized safety risks, smarter field personnel deployment and positioning, and reduced crew labor costs.

Reduce outage O&M and technical losses

The volume of data created by and for operational systems is exponentially increasing, yet the data quality isn’t always reliable. And when data quality isn’t reliable, the foundation for all operations is greatly destabilized. This situation is certainly true for electric utilities. GIS data errors can cause significant operations and maintenance waste and prevent electric utilities from realizing the benefits of advanced distribution management solutions and automation programs. 

GE Digital’s Network Connectivity analytic analyses OMS, GIS, and AMI data to improve network model data integrity. Specifically, it delivers reduced outage O&M, improves customer satisfaction, identifies hidden unbalanced load, and reduces technical losses.

We are on the precipice of a massive transformation in the utility industry. Data was once considered to be a by-product of operations and of use for a very limited amount of time before being cast aside. But now, data has become the very fuel that will power the engines of efficiency and optimization for our customers. Like fuel, however, data must be treated, stored, and eventually delivered to the appropriate engines to unlock its potential.

Having GE Digital’s Grid Analytics software earn Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Product Leadership Award is reflected in our business performance, and offers a proven, reliable, and customizable value proposition for T&D utilities that assures superior operational efficiency in handling grid performance while accommodating distributed energy resources.

Access the 2021 Frost & Sullivan Best Practices in Leadership Award