Leading the Way Forward for DER Grid Management

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are changing the landscape for electric utilities. As adoption goes mainstream, utilities are shifting operating strategies and business models to accommodate DERs such as wind/solar generation, electric vehicles, battery storage, heat pumps and any controllable loads. Developed to provide a wide range of transportation and residential services as well as and energy efficiency, the volume of these devices continues to grow at a pace completely out of the control of electric utilities.

Effective management of DERs is a key challenge driving the need to embrace the digital grid transformation. And crucial to this is partnering with a company, like GE Digital, that has been in the DERMS space for more than 10 years and has a history of delivering global production systems (not only pilots). Our solution brings simplicity, speed, and scale to your electric utility’s digital transformation. Our DER Orchestration software empowers you to successfully navigate this journey - modeling, interconnecting, managing, and orchestrating DERs on your grid in an end-to-end manner, from design and system planning all the way through to control, at both the Transmission and Distribution levels.

Top 3 ranking makes GE Digital a ‘top contender’

With a huge improvement in just a year, gaining three positions in Navigant Research’s Leaderboard to #3 overall, GE Digital is one of the top four companies offering distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) solutions for DER and grid management systems, according to Navigant Research. This places us well ahead of other vendors in the Distribution space, such as OSI, Schneider, Oracle, and ABB. Navigant Research’s annual ranking of vendors evaluates strategy and execution across a range of criteria. This year, the report cites our breadth of solutions across the entire energy value chain as a significant factor in our DER Orchestration offering. With Navigant Research estimating that the DERM market will exceed $2 billion by 2029 with an 18 percent CAGR over the next nine years, GE Digital will continue to expand its presence in this space with significant investment and further customer engagement.

GE Digital’s differentiated DER Orchestration solution is recognized by Navigant Research as leading in the Technology and Product Integration strategy categories as well as the Product Quality and Reliability execution category. All essential factors that matter most to our customers and central to all GE Digital – innovating in a space that’s rapidly evolving and integrating with today’s mission critical systems.

Standalone solutions can neither optimize DERs in combination with other grid levers nor optimize DERs in concert with customer-centric energy efficiency, services, tariffs, etc. With the challenges that DERs present, energy leaders need to embrace an end-to-end solution. Our natively interoperable solution presents a truly differentiated offering, delivering an end-to-end view of DERs across your grid and streamlining orchestration from planning through to control, rather than implementing separate and siloed DERMS that duplicate functionality. This, combined with our stellar execution and focus on customer service, delivers an unrivaled solution for Transmission System Operators (TSOs), Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and vertically integrated utilities that is unmatched in the industry.

GE Digital at the forefront with our ADMS

Working in concert with our DER Orchestration solution, GE Digital’s industry-leading, DER-aware Advanced Distribution Management Solution (ADMS) enables electric utilities to meet customer expectations of a reliable and resilient distribution grid via next-generation control and optimization capabilities. Our ADMS includes highly performant distribution power applications in production and at scale worldwide and encompasses SCADA, DMS, OMS, and Mobility within a single platform to improve grid reliability, safety, security, and efficiency. Each of these applications has evolved to become fully DER-aware. As such they understand and manage the new behaviors of DER objects and the resulting shift in electrical grid power engineering paradigms (intermittency, backfeeds, hidden load, new voltage profiles, etc.). They also add DERs to the list of controls that utilities can act upon, jointly optimized with traditional grid control levers.

Our solution leads in distribution innovation, supplying electricity to approximately 25 percent of worldwide meters served by an ADMS. Our continued commitment to delivering customer value in this space has resulted in 2x business growth in the last two years, a trend we expect to continue.

Winning in the Transmission & Distribution space

GE Digital was an early influencer in the DERMS space and for over a decade we’ve been delivering our DER Orchestration solutions to electric utilities around the world. One recent DER Orchestration success story comes in the T&D space with Stedin, a DSO in the Netherlands that serves 2.2 million customers. GE delivered a comprehensive software solution that forecasts power flow across transmission and distribution and helps manage increasing levels of renewable energy generation. The solution enhances electric power flow look-ahead visibility at interconnection points between the TSO and Stedin. It uses market participants’ declarations as well as machine learning techniques to compute a reliable forecast of the power flow at Stedin’s 39 primary stations. A joint view of forecasting with high accuracy allows the TSO to balance the transmission grid while allowing Stedin to avoid congestion at the distribution level, thereby increasing efficiency and reliability for end customers.

Stedin is pioneering DER orchestration to combat grid congestion management with flexibility. That is, enabling flexible generation and consumption as an alternative to grid reinforcements, via coordination of T&D.

Progress through evolution

GE’s end-to-end DER Orchestration continues to evolve to meet the unique needs of our electric utility customers like Stedin. As more and more utilities embrace our end-to-end approach and long-term customer commitment, GE Digital’s offerings and market share will grow stronger.

In April 2020, GE will release its latest technology improvement: DER Orchestration 2.0, featuring improvements to our forecasting module as well as our IEEE 2030.5 Gateway, which enables monitoring, control, and interconnection of all types of single, grouped or aggregated DERs. Both capabilities are essential to tackle key DER challenges: the volume of these devices is considerable and continues to increase, they are intermittent, they are often internet connected and they don’t tend to belong to the grid operator. Look for more details this April!

Access a summary of the 2020 Navigant Research Leaderboard: DERMS Vendors report here.