Ventyx Joins Swedish, Gotland Smart Grid Project
Sweden is on the verge of developing the world’s smartest power grid systems, to serve the island of Gotland. With the help of Ventyx and some of the world’s leading technology solutions providers the island wants to harness its large quantities of wind and other renewable and distributed energy sources to serve its residents. Ventyx will deploy a comprehensive Distribution System Optimization solution encompassing network control, demand response management, demand forecasting and business analytics to support the project.
The Gotland smart grid project of one of many projects in Europe at the moment as each country tries to meet the European Union's climate change target of reducing carbon emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020.
According to Jens Birgersson, head of the Network Management business at ABB, “The Gotland Smart Grid project is one of the worlds most innovative and significant smart grid initiatives in demonstrating how modernizing electricity networks can support a greater variety of renewable energy sources while at the same time improving power reliability and customer control.”
Key features of the projects include the ability of residents to monitor their energy usage 24 hours a day and adjust its consumption to the current price of electricity. They will be able to set their heater to automatically switch on when there is good access to cheap renewable electricity and switch off when the electricity price goes up.
The project is now in its second phase and so far around 3000 Gotland’s homes have been equipped with smart meters and a photovoltaic plant has been built on the island. At the beginning of this year The Swish Energy Agency committed 50M Kronor (US $2.3M), representing 45 per of the project’s cost. Ventyx’s working along with other partners such as Vattenfall, ABB, GEAB, Svenska Kraftnät, Schneider Electric and KTH, will create what they called a “self-healing power grid”.
Ventyx Network Manager SCADA systems will cover one of the island's substation and its associated network – managing daily operations and helping to reduce the duration and frequency of outages through the use of smart meters and other equipment in the field. The distribution management system (DMS) software by Ventyx will integrated with ABB hardware to address bottlenecks in the distribution network that may restrict the flow from the wind turbines to consumers.
The Ventyx business analytics solution will analyze data from the SCADA/DMS/OMS system, and potentially other sources to help boost operational efficiency and reliability while reducing costs.
The project is redesigning the existing grid with the installation of wireless communication, control, measurement and switching equipment. The distribution network will be divided in smaller sections to make it possible to localize faults in the network. In addition, with the help of security and switching equipment and information from the network the electricity will be automatically switched over to other paths so that fewer customers will be affected by the quality problems.
Gotland is the largest island in the Baltic Sea some 90 km from the Swedish mainland the project begun in September 2012 and will run to December 2015. Its three main objectives are: 1) cost efficiently increase the hosting capacity for wind power in an existing distribution system. 2) show that novel technology can improve the power quality in a rural grid with large quantities of installed wind power. 3) create possibilities for demand-side participation in the electricity market, in order to shift load from peak load hours to peak production hours.