The Energy Transition Driving Grid Complexities
The energy transition is driving radical change across the ecosystem, bringing vast complexities, unpredictability, and volatility to the grid. From the proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) at the “grid edge” including solar, storage, and electric vehicles, to large resources connecting to distribution, sub-transmission and transmission systems, to the rise of ecosystem stakeholders such as prosumers and aggregators, the grid is going through a massive paradigm shift. Further, the effects of climate change should not be forgotten. Every year, more and more severe weather events occur – from hurricanes to heat waves to tornadoes – that further challenge grid operations. As a result, utilities need a comprehensive real-time control and optimization enterprise suite – an Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) as a mission critical operations backbone to deliver grid reliability and resilience.
The Solution to the Rise in DERs
Rising DER adoption and ever-increasing frequency and impact of climate events, compounded by an aging and increasingly scarce engineering labor pool driving the next big ADMS investment wave for utilities. Responding to the market urgency and industry dynamics requires a solution that is flexible and adaptive to changing needs. GE Digital’s increased investment in its modular, evergreen, DER-enabled ADMS expands capabilities and delivers maximum, industry-leading innovation with minimum deployment cost and disruption. Domain experience accumulated through years of partnership with the largest install customer base, globally, and a unique ability to orchestrate energy across Transmission and Distribution (T&D) with IT/OT solutions, such as Distributed Energy Resource Management Software (DERMS), Advanced Energy Management System (AEMS), and Geospatial Network Modelling (GIS) brings differentiated value to utilities looking to solve for the challenges of the energy transition.
A Look into GE Digital’s ADMS Customer Use Cases
GE’s ADMS solution is one of the most storm-proven products in the market, having supported our customers through Hurricanes Ida, Zeta, Delta, Michael, Irma, and Sandy. GE’s storm and outage response capabilities are best in class, bringing advanced analytics to the market to deliver next-generation predictive and prescriptive use cases. With the largest number of storm-proven solutions, industry data confirms that our customers experience 18% less network outages and realize 40% faster restoration time to keep the lights on for their customers*. Additionally, GE Digital’s ADMS recent fault isolation and service restoration (FISR) deployment at Alabama Power Company helped them avoid 260 million customer minutes of interruption, equivalent to 450 years’ worth of outages.
Orion, a New Zealand electricity distribution company, has also deployed GE Digital’s ADMS. GE’s latest generation ADMS solution has enabled Orion to build a “digital twin” replicating their high voltage network and provides software intelligence through its AI and adaptive algorithm capability. These advanced analytics enable different scenarios to be explored without risking the physical network while also providing real-time network utilization and performance optimization. Supporting 30,000 transactions a day, GE’s ADMS is central to Orion’s integrated suite of network management tools and delivers greater accuracy for equipment capacity issues and faster outage restoration times.
GridOS® Orchestration Software - World’s First Grid Software Portfolio Designed for Grid Orchestration
At GE Digital, we cover the full energy value chain, beginning with GIS asset modeling, distribution operator services, transmission operator services, market operator and player solutions. Layered in are also AI/ML-based analytics to support the utilities journey from predictive to prescriptive operations to autonomous, closed-loop optimizations. At the foundation of GE Digital ADMS is the company’s common data fabric; this architecture enables native interoperability across these enterprise systems, including traditional ADMS modules, DERMS, AEMS, GIS, and more.
Our ADMS product solution is underpinned by our recently launched GridOS® Orchestration Software -- the first grid software portfolio designed for proactive grid orchestration. GridOS brings energy data, network modeling, and AI-driven analytics together across the grid to power a suite of composable applications from GE, utilities, and partners that help utilities orchestrate an integrated, flexible, and secure clean-energy grid. By standardizing on a single GridOS deployment, utilities can accelerate their grid modernization and achieve greater operational efficiency, all while staying ahead of future innovations.
Guidehouse Insights Leaderboard: ADMS Vendors Analyst Report
Appropriately, GE Digital’s ADMS has been recognized by leading industry analysts. In a recent report, “Guidehouse Insights Leaderboard: ADMS Vendors”, Q1 2023, GE was positioned as a Leader amongst peers with the highest ‘Execution’ rating across all vendors for being the trusted ADMS solution of choice to meet utility customer needs and deliver grid reliability and resiliency results. As the only vendor with a score of 80+ across all assessed categories, GE’s ADMS solution was rated as the most consistently performing solution in the marketplace with acknowledgement that our geographic reach is unrivaled – serving the largest, most progressive T&D customers globally. Gartner Inc. illustrated similar findings in its recent ADMS report, Gartner® Market Guide for Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), which highlighted GE as the vendor with the largest market share by endpoints served and share growth in 2022.
“Critical success factors for leading ADMS solutions include proven advanced applications at scale, enterprise IT/OT integration, and evergreen environments to deliver high frequency updates supported by an open, agile, and flexible architecture. These features and functionalities are helping to support rapidly evolving business needs including a transition from on-premises to hybrid cloud deployments. GE has proven to be consistently strong across all these elements as evidenced by their depth of global customers.” Mike Kelly, Principal Research Analyst, Guidehouse Insights
GE Digital’s Future with the Upcoming Transition to GE Vernova
For the last 130 years GE has electrified the world and today we are playing a foundational role in the future of the energy transition, and know the grid is pivotal. We can't achieve energy transition without software. The software that we create and deploy will be integral to the transition of a clean electric grid.
The momentum is behind us -- the next 130 years start right now as we transition to GE Vernova and unleash the energy to change the world.
Download Report Here
If you are a utility seeking to better understand the ADMS market and solution, download this complimentary report by Guidehouse to learn more.
* Data source from Annual Electric Power Industry Report, Form EIA-861, October 2022, results based on utilities in the United States that have 1.25 million customers or more. Reliability data reflects average SAIDI and SAIFI with MEDs.