Orion Engineering Corporation’s DOE Distributed Power Program "Distributed Energy Neural Network Integration System (DENNIS®)" is using ground breaking communication and control technologies (C&C) to optimize the utilization of Distributed Generation (DG).
A recent McKinsey study on optimizing energy utilization on a real time basis, suggested that C&C has the potential to reduce U.S. energy costs by $10–15 billion annually.
According to the US Department of Energy, the estimated market potential for Communication & Control (C&C) technologies contains the following baseline assumptions:
§ 5-10% energy savings achieved through advanced C&C technologies
§ 30% ultimate market share for C&C
§ One-year payback required by the end user
The market potential for C&C technologies is between $3.75 billion and $7.5 billion domestically, and between $15 billion and $30 billion worldwide.
DENNIS® provides an effective, scaleable solution for residential, commercial, and industrial facilities, across multiple types of generation devices.
Interest in the use of distributed generation and storage has increased substantially over the past five years because of the potential to provide increased reliability and lower cost of power delivery to the customer particularly with customer-sited generation. The advent of competition in the electric power industry and customer choice have, in part, been the stimulus for this increased interest. Also contributing to this trend has been the development of small modular generation technologies, such as photovoltaics, micro-turbines, and fuel cells. Industry estimates that distributed resources (DR) will account for up to 30% of new generation by 2010. The environmental benefits of distributed power (DP) exploiting, for example, renewable resources, combined heat and power, and hybrid systems are substantial.
The DOE Office of Power Technologies’ goal and vision for the 21st century is full-value distributed power captured in an electricity market in which customers can sell power, employ load management, and provide operations support services (ancillary services) as easily as the utility, in an automated and adaptive electric power system. As the cornerstone of competition in electric power markets distributed power will also serve as a key ingredient in the reliability, power quality, security and environmental friendliness of the electric power system. In supporting customer choice, distributed power may be the long-term foundation of competition in the electric power industry.
Although the application of distributed generation and storage can bring many benefits, the technologies and operational concepts to properly integrate them into the power system must be developed to realize these benefits and avoid negative impacts on system reliability and safety. The current power distribution system was not designed to accommodate active generation and storage at the distribution level particularly to supply energy to other distribution customers. The technical issues to allow this type of operation are significant. For example, control architectures to allow safe and reliable distributed power operation, and particularly to exploit the potential for distributed power to provide grid support, will require system protection redesign. This will require large amounts of information fed to advanced, , intelligent local generation controllers to act quickly to reconfigure and operate local distribution areas for both local and transmission-level benefits. New system architectures and the enabling hardware and software will need to be developed.
Orion Engineering Corporation sees that DP/DG will play a significant role in electric power generation in the next decade and beyond. With this vision and our core DENNIS® technology, we are seeking to advance the state-of-the-art in DP integration and utilization. Our team members are active in the IEEE P1547 (the DP interconnect committee) and working with local institutional partners to develop industry-wide bridges to help integrate the coming wave of DG technologies.