It’s been a busy first half of the year for grid enhancing technologies, with everyone from the Department of Energy to the Federal Regulatory Commission and big tech companies weighing in on their potential to mitigate the massive energy demands predicted to come from artificial intelligence, electrification, and onshoring. Nonetheless, scaled GETs deployments have been few — in part due to long utility timelines for deploying new tech, and in part because many of the technologies don’t yet have standard specifications and ratings.
Deployments of dynamic line rating — which can include digital or physical solutions, or both — have languished in the pilot phase, largely for these reasons. Every vendor has a different solution, and there isn’t a standard methodology to measure its accuracy.
But in early May, National Grid deployed dynamic line rating technology from LineVision on its grid in Syracuse, New York, in what is both a first for the utility and the largest operationalization of DLR in the country.
LineVision’s hybrid software and sensors were deployed on four 115-kilovolt transmission lines in the region, and integrated directly into National Grid’s control room. The utility expects average capacity increases of between 20% and 30% across those lines, it shared exclusively with Latitude Media.
Pradeep Tagare leads investments at National Grid Partners, the utility’s venture investment and innovation fund; he said putting DLR data on control room operator screens was a major step for the utility and for the sector.
“There are lots of different approaches to doing dynamic line ratings,” he said. “As far as we know, none of them have been deployed at this scale with integration in the control room.”
The deployment followed a year of pilots with LineVision, during which the partners examined incoming data, and manually determined which and how much data was useful for control room operators. They also set expectations for the performance of the scaled deployment based on those pilots, Tagare said.
The path to the control room
But getting to the point where LineVision’s system is now sending automated line ratings directly to the transmission control room was a major integration challenge.
“You really do not want to put something in [the control room] unless it’s absolutely critical,” Tagare said. “The technical challenge is making sure that this data is integrated the right way, that we have all of the security issues worked out, and that the integration with existing software is done in a way that is reliable.”
The control room integration amounts to adding another data point for operators to rely on when deciding to increase capacity in a particular line, he added. Increasing capacity increases sag on a line, which is what LineVision is measuring in real time based on the influence of factors like temperature and wind speed.
It’s essentially tech-ifying the process of keeping lines within the accepted sag guardrails, Tagare said.
“Without DLR a lot of it is done on sort of a rule of thumb and experience basis,” he explained. “What this allows us to do is use actual data…to determine if there is room for us to increase capacity on certain circuits.”
It’s that additional data and process change, though, that creates the operational challenge. Making use of DLR means training control room operators on what the data coming in means, and how to act on it. That’s the challenge that GETs vendors may have a harder time grappling with, Tagare said — and directly influences how long it takes to get a project up and running.
“It’s as much a procedural challenge as it is a technical challenge,” he explained. “That’s something that companies like LineVision have to understand, that just because you can do it technically, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be done overnight.”
Repeatable deployments
According to Tagare, National Grid is already considering similar deployments in other parts of its network in New York state, as well as in Massachusetts and in its United Kingdom operations. Those deployments won’t be immediate, though.
“From a technology point of view, that process is now well-known; the first time you do it always takes the longest,” he said. “But there are differences in how the integration is done, so it’s not a simple copy and paste.”
That said, future deployments will require “a lot less effort” now that National Grid has the data from the Syracuse deployment in hand. And, like the first deployment, they can be expected to unfold extremely quickly by utility standards. That’s in part because NGP identified LineVision’s tech as relatively low risk, Tagare said.
“The beauty of LineVision is that it does not require any outage,” he said. “The sensors are not on the transmission lines themselves, so from that point of view the reliability issue is the reliability of the data, not of the equipment per se.”
That’s compared to the risk of tech like advanced conductors, where deployments require the replacement of an entire line — a much harder sell on a tight timeline. If LineVision’s sensors go down, though, the fact that the system uses on-premise software means that the DLR data feed to the control room will continue to operate without interruption. It’s that message of the tech’s low-risk nature that National Grid Partners is hoping to convey to its industry peers , armed with new data from the Syracuse deployment to back it up.
“This is something we believe can be deployed relatively easily and relatively quickly without much risk,” Tagare added. “And for certain parts of the network it provides a relatively quick solution to congestion.”
