Our Defining Decade: Three Innovations We’ll Need to Keep the Grid Running

The next ten years will dictate the grid for the next 50+ years.

That’s a bold statement, but the progress we make in the next decade will shape how the industry navigates a host of challenges — from cyber-attacks and extreme weather events to the energy transition itself.

It’s clear that we need innovation more than ever. But what kind of innovation do we need, and what are the consequences of inaction?

Continue reading to understand the three key areas of grid innovation that are vital for the industry's progress.

Cast your mind back to the recent past. If a Planning Engineer wanted to carry out a single grid simulation, it’d take two days to collect and align all the relevant data. And then just another 30 seconds to run the analysis. We’ve come a long way since then, but the sheer volume of data has grown too — and that presents new challenges.

Today, you must collect, process, and analyze data from millions of end points and integrate them with a wider grid ecosystem. That ecosystem is rapidly expanding (consider the ongoing penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) alone), which means more and more data to manage.

To make sense of what’s happening, you can’t just look at everything in isolation. You need the ability to analyze multiple data sources in a single place. When you have a centralized way to monitor your operational data, it becomes easier to improve reliability, optimize energy usage, and make proactive grid management decisions.

The digitization of the grid has given rise to a complex, connected ecosystem. And as it interacts with DERs, weather systems, and energy markets, the grid has become more vulnerable to cyber threats. Which is why a new standard of security is needed.

The traditional security systems of old essentially applied a ‘castle-and-moat approach’: it trusted people on the inside, but not the outside. But simply defending a network perimeter leaves an organization exposed to more sophisticated threats and insider attacks.

That’s why Zero Trust grid security principles need to become the industry standard. A Zero Trust grid security model assumes that everybody is a potential threat — both inside and outside your business.  And it continually requires users and systems to prove their identities.

This rigorous approach to security will only become more vital as the grid becomes increasingly connected.

In the coming decade, the industry at large needs to eliminate a longstanding roadblock to progress — working in silos. A perfect example is the disconnect between transmission and distribution.

When these systems are disjointed, it creates inefficiencies that can lead to grid congestion, power outages, and costly errors that result in safety risks. But this disconnect can be solved with a common transmission and distribution network model.

By bringing these separate systems together via a common model, you can analyze from a single source of the truth. With a more reliable and complete view of your grid environment, you can then make faster, more informed decisions that lead to a more reliable, resilient grid.

We’ve reached a critical moment in the history of the grid.  The next ten years will be a defining period in shaping our industry, and within that time, we’ll need continual innovation to tackle a host of emerging grid challenges.

At GE Digital, one area we’re innovating in is the shift away from grid management, and towards grid orchestration. Orchestration is based on the principle that the complexity of grid challenges can’t be dealt with in isolation.

This is where GridOS^® comes in. GridOS is the first software portfolio designed specifically for grid orchestration. It’s a software suite and partner ecosystem that helps tackle the challenges above, such as creating a truly integrated grid built on Zero Trust grid security principles.