The energy company’s plans focus on the grid of the future – Taking a dated electrical grid and turning it into a system that is both flexible and bi-directional, capable of protecting itself against power outages by using distributed energy resources (DER) to improve resiliency.
The new plan is the result of a settlement agreement reached August 29 with several environmental, consumer and other groups. State regulators must still approve the plan, but one thing is sure – It is an ambitious plan and will be of great benefit to the state of Florida.
The core of the proposal calls for dropping the Levy Nuclear Project and creating a $400 million “self-optimizing grid,” including acquiring 50 MW of storage, installing 500 EV charging stations, and adding 700 MW of solar power. Jay Oliver, Duke’s general manager of grid solutions engineering and technology, says this will help the company to “better incorporate rooftop solar and other distributed energy.”
It’s estimated that about 80 percent of Floridians will be connected to the self-optimising grid when it is completed. Duke plans to add automation and artificial intelligence, allowing the grid to be monitored remotely. This will also make it easier to identify and isolate any problem areas and reroute power.
The self-optimising grid will also be more segmented, having more control points and sensors, making rerouting of power easier with automation technology. “This gives us a lot of intelligence about the types of DER and the effects of them,” he explained. “We can sense voltage and current.”
By using smart grid technology, Duke is advancing from the one-way grid network to one that will enable two-way power flow. Oliver adds, “When there’s a power outage, for example, on the main circuit line, the goal is to automatically re-route power.”
“Smart grid” technologies create a self-healing grid
Call it resilience, but a two-way or smart grid is a self-healing grid, meaning it has the ability to automatically work around power failures by detecting and isolating outages. This type of smart grid is made possible by the use of two-way communication technologies, control systems, and computer processing.
The technologies are amazing and include sensors known as Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) that allow operators to assess the stability of the grid. Digital meters in homes will give consumers better information and automatically report outages.
Technologies also include relays that sense and recover from faults in the substation automatically, automated feeder switches that re-route power around problems, and batteries that store excess energy and make it available later to the grid to meet customer demand.
