IDC: The Next Key to the Development of Smart Grid--Distribution Optimization

People have always said that the rise of distribution automation and distribution network optimization will be a big event in the next few years. Now a report from IDCEnergyInsights further confirms that “public utility company executives are deeply interested in this”. Market hotspots are always focused on "things that users want." IDC has visited utility companies that have deployed smart meters and found that they are very interested in FLISR (Fault Location, Isolation, and Recovery) and Volt/VAR (Voltage Reactive power optimization is second only to interest.

The latest report of IDCEnergyInsights, “Business Strategy: Strikes in Distribution Optimization,” believes that the senior management of utility companies has a deep interest in using new power distribution optimization applications.

IDC believes that the most likely applications to be adopted in the near future are integrated voltage and reactive power optimization control (IVVC), fault location/isolation and recovery (FLISR). At the same time, when visiting these top management groups, they mentioned that distribution management vendors are the most trusted suppliers.

IDC selected respondents from utilities that have deployed or are deploying AMIs and smart meters to evaluate their thoughts on the economic and technical feasibility of power distribution optimization applications, as well as cost and adoption schedules.

The FLISR application ranks highest in technical feasibility and is also the application most interesting to executives. IVVC applications for energy conservation are ranked second in terms of economic viability (taking into account the utility investment capacity and reducing the cost of manual operations). The setting of each indicator is based on the deployment of these applications from 2012 to 2013.

Executives said they are also interested in applications such as dynamic voltage optimization and virtual power plants, but will consider deploying these applications later.

According to Marcus Torchia, IDC Smart Grid Strategy Research Manager, “Distributed new energy generation, energy storage and electric vehicles will increase the complexity of the network, and some of them need to be adapted through the redesign of the central command and control structure. Operators need to change their original active monitoring. All distribution network activities to deal with abnormal conditions, using automated systems to replace them to deal with non-routine issues."