Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Characteristics
Todays grid
Smart grid
Active consumer
participation
Consumers are
uninformed and do
not participate
Informed, involved
consumers; demand
response and
distributed energy
resources
Accommodation of all
generation and
storage option
Dominated by central
generation; many
obstacles exists for
distributed energy
resources
interconnection
Many distributed
energy resources with
plug and play- focus
on renewables
Mature, well
integrated wholesale
markets. Growth of
new electricity
markets for
consumers
Provision of power
quality for digital
Power quality a
priority with a variety
Capgeminis Vision:
Capgemini believes that in order to make
meaningful progress toward addressing the
current grid challenges and delivering on the
future grid characteristics, utilities should
focus on four main activities:
The combination of energy price increases and consumers increased sense of responsibility for the impact of their energy usage
on the environment.
The frequency and extent of blackouts are driving consumers, politicians and regulators alike to demand assessment and upgrade of
the industrys aging network infrastructure.
For customer service (call center) functionsCalls can be anticipated when an outage has occurred, making systems more responsive
to customers. Armed with answers, calls can be resolved faster,
allowing delivery of accurate information and a reduction of callbacks, queue times and staffing levels.
Thermal issues are generally related to thermal limits caused, change in the
network configuration. In a meshed power system, there can occur a situation
where a low impedance line carries much more power than originally designed for,
while parallel paths are underutilized.
In the future when, among others, private companies will operate
transmission lines and sell energy to interested parties, the load flow will
have to be controlled. One possibility is to use HVDC lines; another
possibility is load flow control using FACTS devices in an AC network;
Voltage and reactive power control issueslow voltage at heavily loaded
transmission lines as well high voltage at lightly loaded lines are
undesirable occurrences in transmission lines.
The first can be a limiting factor responsible for reduced value of the transmitted
power and the second can cause equipment damage.
The corrective actions with utilization of selected FACTS devices include correcting
the power factor and compensating reactive losses in lines by supplying reactive
power;