Efficient grid expansion
A combination of robust technology and digital innovations leads to increased efficiency
Maintaining or even increasing grid performance is becoming ever more challenging. With growing efforts, expenses grow as well. Innovative technologies and smart data usage can help municipalities and DSOs to master these challenges and to increase their competitiveness.
Get the most out of your grid
Economical operation of power grids depends upon spending investments in a smart way. Siemens offers a comprehensive portfolio of products, solutions, and services to thoroughly analyze a grid’s status, prevent asset failures, optimize maintenance of assets, and economically integrate the growing amount of energy from renewable sources.Find out more in detail under the following topics
Data makes your life easier
When faults occur in the grid, control center personnel must respond rapidly and effectively in a targeted manner – despite the highly complex failure situation. The objective is to quickly restore power in the grid. Doing so means that personnel must collect and analyze all necessary information in order to undertake appropriate countermeasures. Profound knowledge of the grid – based on in-depth analysis – helps by reducing effort, increasing availability, and optimizing operational performance.
Benefits for control center operators
- Reduced fault location costs
- Quick service restoration to unaffected grid sections
- Open solution allows easy integration with existing communication networks
- Continuously updated grid information in the SCADA system to reduce investments
- Automatic documentation of outages thanks to OMS functionality
Highlight products for control centers
System monitoring for optimized grid maintenance
Distribution grid monitoring makes it possible to optimize grid maintenance. It enables prioritization of maintenance deployments and early detection of faults in load switches and circuit breakers. Systematic monitoring can identify potential faults and failures before they occur. This also helps to proactively and efficiently plan maintenance cycles based on the state and history of the grid. A long-term database is helpful in assessing when the service life of operating equipment will come to an end.
Benefits of knowing your grid’s condition
- Early detection of potential problems
- Reduction of costly time-based maintenance practice
- Online insight on condition of switching devices and other assets
- Improve supply quality level
- Optimize CAPEX and OPEX by planning and spending expenses where they are needed most
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Controlling and balancing distributed generation efficiently
Coordinated scheduling and dispatch of distributed energy resources, including energy storage, helps tackle overload situations and voltage problems, and at least balance generation and load. The most efficient manner is to gain access to the distributed energy resources to balance the infeed in combination with the load via a control system. Many industrial processes allow not only a shutdown for load reduction. They also facilitate increased consumption during a high power production period as well. These actions can avoid investments into the grid expansion.
Benefits of balancing generation and load
- Avoiding shutdowns
- Compliance with rules and regulations
- Stable grid
- Reduce investments into the grid expansion
Products for controlling distributed power producers
Seamlessly integrate IT and OT
Analyses of past projects confirm that integrating IT and OT into the engineering process can save time and money. Much of the effort involved in such system integration was attributed to converting between different protocols. High costs were also incurred when connecting differing systems in the control centers and other systems such as energy resource planning. Consequently, power providers and suppliers worldwide have developed common standards in order to reduce costs and effort. This enhances the security of investments.
Benefits of integrating IT and OT
- Reduce engineering costs by avoiding data conversion between protocols and interfaces
- Get rid of gateways to convert between different protocols
- Secure investment using long-lasting standards and open protocols
