Grid Capacity Management | Smarter Grid Solutions

Grid Capacity Management solutions are essential for resolving clean energy hosting capacity limitations created by utility scale and aggregate residential distributed generation (DG), energy storage, new low-carbon loads and other distributed energy resources (DER). Our Grid Capacity Management solutions create grid interconnection headroom, resolve distribution capacity constraints, enable bi-directional power flows, deliver voltage control and other capacity creating use cases. Our Strata Grid product provides the foundation for our range of Grid Capacity Management solutions.

Distributed renewable generation and low-carbon technology developments connect to distribution networks whose capacity and headroom are becoming increasingly constrained. DER introduces problems for Distribution Utilities and Distribution System Operators (DSOs) including potential thermal and voltage violations, bi-directional power flows and other network operational challenges. Upgrading the distribution grid capacity through grid asset additions to create the required headroom is both costly and time-consuming. This creates a significant blocker and expense to the successful integration of clean energy technologies into the electricity system.

Our grid capacity management is based on our market-leading Strata Grid product. This combines preventative control approaches with corrective control methods and fail-to-safe mechanisms. Our preventative control approaches allow for market-based look-ahead control including forecasting, optimization and dispatch ahead of real-time delivery. Our corrective control methods include monitoring the network state in real-time and instantaneously delivering threshold-based DER set-point control to secure the grid assets within their limits. Our configurable fail-to-safe mechanisms cater for DER non-compliance, communications or control failure and move the network and connected DER to a configured safe state, ready for automatic resolution or control operator intervention.

Strata Grid provides the configurable, layered control platform infrastructure to deliver the mission critical capacity, headroom and DER control functionality that Distribution Utilities and DSOs need.

Strata Grid is commonly configured to deliver on-site, point of common coupling, wide area and market integrated DER control. Other customer-specific flexible headroom and capacity solutions can also be implemented and managed as required.

We have ensured that Strata Grid is not dependent on a full network model or power flow analysis in the real-time control loop. Instead, Strata Grid integrates with and utilizes network models and online power flow to automatically configure our real-time control algorithms so that they always operate on the current network and DER configuration and state. This delivers our solutions faster and at lower cost. This also requires less through-life model maintenance and addresses common data challenges. These features have been shown to maximize DER interconnection headroom and minimize operational curtailment, typically increasing hosting capacity by 50-100%.

Our grid capacity management solutions also integrate with ADMS, SCADA, grid analytics, a wide range of utility assets, novel grid technologies, market platforms and other utility and partner systems (using open standards and proprietary APIs) to enhance and extend grid capacity management.