Thomas Kiessling, the CTO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, provided in a keynote at the Enlit Europe event, held in Milan between 30th November to 2nd December 2021 his thoughts on how to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption  He outlined in twenty-odd minutes keynote his transformation list to enable this with “All of us will go through disruption and opportunity.”

When anyone argues from the start of their keynote: “that no one would dispute that the energy sector is ripe for disruption, we have to go through profound change.” Then further adding, “there is a need to transform the systems radically“, you indeed start paying attention.

Kiessling said the industry “has entered a much greater degree of uncertainty. And uncertainty needs entrepreneurs; it needs trial and error, and it needs system-scale innovation.”

Emerging from the recent CoP26 held in Glasgow between 31st October to 12th November 2021, the push towards a net-zero future is the reality ahead. “After COP26, no one would dispute that the energy sector is ripe for disruption. We have to go through profound change.”

The CoP26 outcome calls for a fundamental, profound system change within the energy system and the global need for the whole energy community to cope with this net-zero need.

Kiessling cited a recent report from Boston Consulting and the German Federation of Industry, recognizes that no sector today is set up correctly for the change that needs to happen and argues this German perspective reflects across the Globe. He cited a doubling of electricity demand in the next 20 to 25 years, with a requirement of a tripling of the supply of PV and Wind firstly. “Each makes up part of a massive “collective” challenge.”

Kiessling suggests we are entering “a period of uncertainty.” and his view is uncertainty calls for Entrepreneurs as much ahead within the energy system changes ahead will have high levels of “trial and error.”

He calls for a regulatory framework to encourage flexibility and innovation and, at the same time, to ensure that production (of Electricity) needs to be secure, resilient and the supply significantly increased.

Various “asides” are provided throughout this review.

* I have provided some “asides” to clarify or explain as well to help put a further context for a broader reading community, as the keynote was given to an audience of energy experts. Some additional examples were sought from Thomas Kiessling following this keynote to illustrate his points, it makes this review longer, but it brings added value.

There are parallels with other significant industrial disruptions

Kiessling drew parallels with other industrial areas that have gone through similar and significant disruptions, such as telecommunications, factory automation and even data centres, stating there is a lot to learn from these examples.

• My aside here is that those industries did go through massive disruption. Perhaps the power grid can be considered the most complex system humanity ever built, as all our energy consumption is directly linked to power consumption. Equally, the electrical power grid has only added increased complexity over time.
• Second aside here: A major part of the energy transition is it is moving from a traditional vertically integrated hierarchy into a new form of operating within a more open “smart, intelligent grid” to enable an instantaneous, on all-the-time, safe, two-way passage, of information and energy needs will become a real game-changer. We can learn from other significant disruptions, but the energy transition is, for many, the most complex, operationally and technically demanding.

As Thomas Kiessling rightly points out in this keynote, combining operational technology, managing (differently) the physical assets and underlying technology is the set of things we need to manage together.

Preparing the Energy Company- a transformation approach

The primary point of his keynote was “how to prepare as an Energy Company” for the challenges ahead where a seven-fold increase in renewables with still the number one objective of having the security of supply and resilience within the system being paramount.

The structure of the keynote for Energy System Change

The keynote provided seven needs for transitional change.

Today as we transform our power generation into renewables, we face ageing powerlines, struggling to add capacity, a lack of (real-time) awareness, difficulties in controlling the voltage, especially at the grid edge.

Kiessling used specific examples of the needs in Electricity and the Grid Edge to underline the changes needed to be undertaken.

Firstly today, the need is to apply cutting edge technology.

Transition need one: The security of supply, resilience, and automation

Point One: Kiessling points out we will see less inertia and less short circuit power in the networks. There will need to be more sophisticated fault detection algorithms. Kiessling points out the likely need is to change the network protection architecture of the network itself. For example, the overcurrent and distance protection might need to be substituted by differential protections. AI technology will help to do this.

The good news here suggested by Thomas Kiessling is that AI and Analytics are well on their way to help in this transformation to control and operate the network in a “real-time” fashion. This shift in managing the system’s demands becomes a major transiting challenge.

• As an aside here: Historically, for example, in the U.S. power grid, inertia from conventional fossil, nuclear, and hydropower generators was abundant—and thus taken for granted in the planning and operations of the system. But as the grid evolves with increasing penetrations of inverter-based resources—e.g., wind, solar photovoltaics, and battery storage—that do not inherently provide inertia, questions have emerged about the need for inertia and its role in the future grid. Understanding the role of inertia requires understanding the interplay of inertia and these other services, particularly primary frequency response, which is derived mainly from relatively slow-responding mechanical systems.

Point two made here was shifting from static monitoring to a more dynamic setup. The present static load flow calculation to operate the network needs different thinking. As rotating masses are progressively removed, it will require different approaches with renewables towards a more dynamic data-driven environment.

• Aside here– examples provided later by Thomas Kiessling on issues that support this point two:
  • Static load flow calculation will not detect wide-area power swings, which might cause tripping of circuit breakers.
  • Such power swings might increase when rotating masses are decommissioned from the network.
  • Dynamic Stability Supervision is needed, typically using Phasor measure units.
  • There are promising technologies to detect upcoming dangerous situations early in a world of volatility.

Kiessling liked this, in an interesting comparison, to “resembling a patient-monitoring system during heart surgery” – one that was dynamic, self-healing and would evolve into a “system of systems”. This monitoring system needs to understand the system’s metrics in a real-time fashion to understand if dangerous situations are coming over the network to respond to these.

Point three– the need for self-healing networks. Closed-loop switching to help isolate and restore network segments in fast fashions and apply a very different total fault metric to this.

The need comes to the point of a system of systems for semi-autonomous parts of the network, driven by renewables can then manage themselves and contribute to the overhaul resilience of the network, so it becomes a “resilient, decentralized and autonomous system”.

• Aside here: This is taking the smart grid as a System of Systems (SOS) which moves towards operation independence of the elements, the ability to manage within a network the autonomy of these elements, as well as have an evolutionary development to retire at any time without causing an impact to other parts of the system, provide for emergent behaviour to meet the demands for a clean, economical and efficient way by all in the system design and finally allow for geographic distribution to be highly dispersed and linked through information exchange channels.

These transitions will need industry cooperation to mature these technologies and set all the energy systems up for the planned and expected growth.

As pointed out in the keynote- we all need to learn how to deal with data, and this is a cultural change where the need for data scientists, data lakes and IT/OT need to come together in new, radically different ways.

Transition need 2: Digitalization and Data

The challenge is validating and enriching the data to make it useable.

One example provided here is how Smart Meters are now going beyond just billing, but a deeper verification for providing data that increases the awareness of the network of power consumption, specifically on the grid edge. This shift enables improved metrics, planning and operational management for capacity planning, better aggregation insights, forecasting potential, ultimately improving the industry’s capital efficiencies and allowing the prosumer to participate.

Aside: Siemens re-launched their meter data management software EnergyIP at the Enlit Europe event, where its focus has a higher level of user-centricity and supporting customers to get ready for future changes to the energy system.  Links to the PRESS RELEASE and MORE information, taken from the Siemens website

Transition need 3: Innovation and proactivity

The use of power electronics, inverter-based resources will inform and stabilize the grid and protect the infrastructure.

• Aside here: Invertor-based resources including wind, solar and storage can quickly detect frequency deviations and respond to system imbalances. These “fast-frequency responses” can provide response rates faster than traditional mechanical responses from conventional generators, thereby reducing the need for inertia.

One example offered within the keynote was operating, simulating and monitoring islands (actual physical islands) as rotation free, here Siemens has several larger-scale projects around the world.

The massive opportunities here is to system scale innovation and reinvention, yet there are three fundamental issues to tackle

1. Inverters from different manufacturers require generic inverter models enabling standardization across the industry to achieve a rotator free network.
2. Challenge two: In larger transmission scenarios the inverters are located at a larger distance and this increases the risk of more weakly damped oscillations. Therefore, we need accurate simulation models and algorithms and present challenge
3. The issue of time-varying eigen modes is a challenge to be addressed. As the generation changes between conventional and inverter-based (or renewable) generation from hour to hour, the oscillatory behaviour of your power system will change, this requires an operator support system that continuously analyses the dynamics and if needed, the power system needs to adjust on the fly to secure N-1 failure security

In conclusion, to get to a rotation, free network in most countries calls for a system scale innovation for the energy community to work together to resolve and scale these specific challenges.

Transition need 4: Dealing with Cooperation at all levels

For example, TSOs and DSOs must cooperate more to cope with volatile inputs from renewables

Offered following the keynote to explain this cooperation point Kiessling gave a concrete example of how such cooperation can help speed progress to carbon-free networks:

With less and less TSO control of conventional power plants and rotating masses, the TSO’s mission to secure grid balance will be harder to achieve. This is because the TSO has no direct control over RES at the distribution grid. That’s where DSO comes into play. The DSO can react to TSO control signals, effectively providing ancillary services by aggregating DER and DSR This allows operators to reduce TSO side issues like redispatch, which has increased dramatically in some countries in recent years

In one of Siemens research projects cooperating with multiple TSOs / DSOs, this work has verified this works using real network data of TSOs, and are now working on deploying this with a number of TSOs

• Aside: Having clear definitions of data to be exchanged, recognizing network development in demand and generation forecasts, establishing the ancillary services, load shedding, and capacity markets will all need greater collaboration. Exchanging planning information, coordinating technical studies to assess constraints on the system, dealing with congestion management, having common grid user understanding and free exchanges on available network capacity, all needs listening and collaborating more in the new system needs.

Transition need 5: Standardization and scalability

The keynote comes back to evolving into this vision of a system of systems. The system will resemble more of a system of systems, where energy nodes will take autonomous decisions that contribute to overall grid stability, only possible with standardization among nano, Micro, distribution and transport grids.

• Aside Standardization matters because larger power systems will have many grid-forming inverters from different vendors. There is a need to harmonize cyber security standards so as to ensure a common level of cyber security for the entire, interconnected energy system and Cooperation between TSO and DSO for ancillary services and transport grid balance requires interconnection standards.

Transition need 6: Regulations for flexible investment plans

As pointed out by Thomas Kiessling we need a regulatory environment that builds digitalization into incentive frameworks. To build on this

We need to simplify data collection across the industry already at the point of asset registration and there need to be energy data best practices that are embraced by operators

To speed innovation, regulators should give grid infrastructure stakeholders (including equipment manufacturers) access to past operational data so they can model solutions. At present, the network operators often have a hard time getting innovation investments approved by regulators, even as research projects with part of the issues coming from digitalization investment, by nature, will lead to a certain amount of innovative trial and error, as is the case of every innovation

Such an investment is in competition with simply adding hardware assets most of the time with a fixed rate of asset capital return. The regulator and the DSO understand this process much better. One way to evolve this logic is to start looking at business outcomes

What is the asset base needed to deliver a given amount of energy? Capital efficiency incentives need to be introduced into the discussion. The flexibility to deploy Opex or Capex needs to be increased.

Here lies a cultural and transformational problem, as regulators have been “engrained” to approve and measure in a certain way, to apply known metrics or handed down-regulation requirements to safeguard energy.

You have to start with “what do we dare in the industry?”, “what do we focus upon?” and how can all involved in the energy transition collaborate, learn and work together.

Aside: that would be unique but will be necessary for all stakeholders within the Energy system

Transition need 7: Consumer/prosumer focus

It is forecasted that Distributed Energy Resources will grow sevenfold by 2030. At a changing grid edge, data is (simply) not there, to prove that investment or change.

In a further follow-up, due to limits of time within the keynote, the points were offered by Kiessling in a set of challenges to be addressed.

Today’s reality: DSOs often don’t know if authorizing the next EV charging stations leads to voltage band violations. The DSO might also curtail solar production expecting overvoltage events

This is not based on data at the point of potential under or over voltage, since that data is rarely available today. There is then risk and leading to a perception in the industry that parts of the network could actually carry twice the load without a problem, but due to lack of data the generation & load balance is kept well below the actual capacity

How can this be changed and what help within the evolving grid edge provide a change that allows for the transformation to take shape?

So, what if you could estimate the status of LV lines based on a combination of real-time data available typically at the substation level, plus meter data, even if you get that meter only once a day or periodically

Siemens is working with DSOs on pilots to use neural networks to estimate if and where voltage issues arise both on load and on the DER supply side.  These methods achieve better transparency, enabling the DSO to curtail less, and authorize more new loads like EV chargers

This information, combined with peak shaving, load shifting, storage systems to smooth out supply and demand, will go a long way to accommodate new loads and prosumer systems.

Thomas Kiessling’s suggestion is in the application of Neural Networks- “Achieving more informed decisions”

The possible solution to make changes in the Grid Edge is to use substation data alongside offline smart meters. That data can be extrapolated to identify hotspots and load needs and becomes a Network Grid Edge.

This approach avoids having more sensors on every meter or connecting point to save time and expense. It can be pushed out over time and experience to connect into the final energy-consuming point.

• Aside here: A neural network is likely to be a series of algorithms that endeavours to recognize underlying relationships in a set of data through a process that mimics the way the human brain operates or, in this case, the energy system. In this sense, neural networks refer to systems of neurons, either organic or artificial in nature. An artificial neuron receives a signal, then processes it and can signal neurons connected to it. The “signal” at a connection is a real number, and the output of each neuron is computed by some non-linear function of the sum of its inputs. The connections are called edges. Neurons and edges typically have a weight that adjusts as learning proceeds. Source (partly Wikipedia)

Achieving more informed decisions

This proposal made by Thomas Kiessling can provide a more apparent determination of the grid edge’s state and provide the state of the LV network for more informed decisions and (more targeted) capital investment.

So here, innovation and creative thinking are being applied to solve a current problem holding back the needed Grid Edge shift to the intelligent use of consumption and demand data. Insights gained will improve the knowledge on the network without deployment at scale, of sensors to provide an assessment of data close to demand.

• Aside: For me, the idea of the concept suggested, Neural Networks offers the potential to bring about change, bring data, AI, technology into the equation to accelerate the Grid Edge was the most intriguing point.

So, in the conclusion of Thomas Kiessling’s Keynote.

We are in a disruptive phase; Kiessling provided in his keynote a transformation list of needs to follow, specifically working through issues and challenges both in the transmission, distribution and Grid Edge networks. He gave many rich examples that are already shifting Energy and Grid Edge design. These offered radically different ways to manage the demand and supply, reflecting the changing nature of power generation, distribution and grid edge supply.

Thomas Kiessling’s final comment was we do need to “wrap our minds around it” to undergo such a disruptive time of profound system change. It is how the energy community comes together and finds ways to imagine, collaborate to learn and share.

I found the keynote stimulating, thoughtful and informative.

The post How to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption – Thomas Kiesslings Enlit Keynote first appeared on Innovating the Energy Transition.

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

I was looking at the changes made by Siemens on their meter data management software on their recent relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®; their next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

“Siemens is taking its market-leading meter data management software to the next level, supporting customers to get ready for future changes to the energy system,” said Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

Siemens has taken a design thinking and co-creation approach to understanding customer needs.  Siemens worked extensively with multiple customers globally to understand their exact needs when it comes to meter data management.

The relaunched MDM software focused on enhancing user-centricity

EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers.  The solution has focused explicitly on workflow improvements, giving the new software a more efficient, intuitive, insightful, adaptable and ready to use sense and feel.

With the new relaunched software, users can see everything clearly on one screen through EnergyIP Mosaic’s new, modern interface that can swiftly bring together all the information you need on one screen.

This update differs significantly from the past EnergyIP Mosaic® offers a new, modern interface that swiftly brings together all the information on one screen, whereas in the past, there were requirements to open multiple tabs in the UI. Data, correlations, root causes, and other advanced functionalities are intuitive and easily understandable with interactive visualizations and shortcuts.

“EnergyIP Mosaic® lets you find what you need and understand what you see.”

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

This next-generation solution offers far greater efficiency and flexibility to busy users. The modern interface is easy to learn and use, improving customer experience. Management can quickly review dashboards and data on the go using a tablet to help in any facilitation or deliver a quicker answer for actions and insights.

New capabilities of EnergyIP® MDM

A significantly increased focus on Event Data and Action Management (EDAM)

Do you want to save time by detecting anomalies automatically?
There is so much your data is telling you: the health of your hardware, safety issues, revenue loss, meter installation issues and operational issues. EDAM automatically analyses AMI data, events and interval read with multiple detection rules created by you for your business needs.

Achieving greater Business Monitoring

Do you know what is going on with your operations on a daily basis?

Remove the “black box” and increase the transparency of AMI data to make quick, confident decisions. Users can drill down to investigate data collection and quality issues, see trends and spot geographical clusters of potential service issues points. The users can quickly gain situational awareness and better visibility into data quality issues for effective resolution.

KPI’s significantly improve through this increased transparency. For instance, now it provides KPI potential for what percentage of service points have complete data from a business perspective, improving the data quality. Also built-in is the ability for KPI’s to be constructed for different ratepayer groups, customer classes, AMI systems etc.

The new software gives easier viewing, more informed data to make quicker, confident decisions from data collection and exception management to billing and data exporting, as well as monitoring of usage anomalies; you will have insight into the data and be equipped to act. The real value of providing actionable interactive dashboards for both ongoing and exception resolution handling has become a critical feature.

The availability of Software-as-a-Service is part of this relaunch

Are your critical IT personnel overloaded with maintaining an ever-changing IT landscape? The new EnergyIP Mosaic® offers three different EnergyIP Deployment Models.

So what are the different benefits and trade-offs?

The most traditional MDM model is EnergyIP MDM On-Premise. This MDM model offers the utilities a license model. As the customer, they are responsible for purchasing the licenses, storing the data and additional costs that will occur regarding maintenance updates and/or software upgrades. It is highly customizable and configurable but has its limits and cost considerations to evaluate, depending on the future business plans and the available capital.

The second option is the Hosted one; this is growing in its popularity with the increasing need for data to be stored in the Cloud. Hosted offers the customization and configuration of on-premise, but customers save space and reduce IT costs by storing data in the Cloud. Therefore, the data is NOT stored in a data centre at a customer’s physical location. It is stored in a private cloud environment that only the customer has access to.

The third option is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and is rapidly becoming the future for software and is now available for EnergyIP® MDM SaaS globally. EnergyIP MDM SaaS was launched in early 2021 in the United States. SaaS offers unique benefits because it is a subscription model, and data is stored on a secure but public hosted site. EnergyIP MDM SaaS uses AWS, Amazon Web Services. SaaS is lower cost and has a faster implementation time.

SaaS has all the great benefits of EnergyIP MDM.

Having available all the functionalities, SaaS provides the real option of reducing your risks, cost and complexity in a preconfigured service with Cloud-based security and regular upgrades to allow the MDM provider to focus on their core business and have a very limited IT infrastructure investment and workload pressures. This option is an all-in-one subscription. Implementation can be rapid, possibly within three months, depending on the connectivity and the existing designed communications network and its integration into any more comprehensive technology solutions planned or in use and dependencies on its interoperability and cybersecurity assessments.

Intelligence and building sustainable action capabilities

As Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, states: “We need intelligence – be it automation or artificial intelligence – to provide improved guidance to grid operators. Digitalization is the key enabler to make grids flexible enough to handle the rising complexity caused by an ever-increasing infeed of renewable energy and a growing share of EVs on the road while remaining resilient.

To master the new complexity, we have to turn data into knowledge and knowledge into sustainable action. With our digital technologies, we want to help utilities safeguard and even accelerate the energy transition.

We need to find better ways to use the already collected data for new purposes. For example, in the past, smart meter data was used for billing purposes only. But data collected by smart meters is extremely valuable for other processes as well.”

EnergyIP can be central to current or future add-on applications.

EnergyIP will be ready to support what customers change or try to accomplish in the future (e.g. changing rates, changing AMI infrastructure, new data privacy and cyber security regulations, exchanging IT landscape, new value add use cases.

EnergyIP Portfolio leads the market in MDM and related applications

Discover the full potential of your data beyond meter-to-cash with add on applications such as Analytics Foundation, Revenue Protection, Integration Adaptors, Low Voltage Outage Management, Advanced Device Management, Energy Engage, Prepay and Front End Processor.

Siemens sums up the result of this relaunch.

“We worked extensively with our User Advisory Board, the largest global user community dedicated exclusively to MDM, to understand their exact operational needs. EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers. We’ve improved task efficiency by up to 85%, and situational assessment time has been reduced by 60%. By focusing on workflow improvements, the new software is more efficient, intuitive, insightful, and adaptable,” states Ming Ho, Senior Director of User Experience and Strategic Innovations.

Find out more on the relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®, the next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

So to unlock the full value of your smart metering investment, take a visit and learn more about EnergyIP®’s Metering Solutions on the Siemens site here, where you’ll find all the latest EnergyIP Metering materials, including brochures and datasheets as well as customer support information.

Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic® “lets you find what you need and understand what you see”

The post Exploring Siemens relaunch of their next generation of Meter Data Management first appeared on Innovating the Energy Transition.

Hydrogen is becoming a central pillar for many countries across the world to help achieve their targets to this net-zero by mid-century. Hydrogen holds, it seems, such a promise, but it is nearly all to do. There is so much to validate, prove, and certainly scale to make a real impact on changing the sources of our energy.

The more you investigate Hydrogen, the more you realize the complexity of making it a viable energy source of sufficient scale. One that will really deliver the suggested results that Hydrogen could meet 24% of the worlds final energy demands by 2050. Today it provides around 1%. To change our energy systems reliant on Oil, Gas, Coal, and make these renewables based on Solar, Wind, and Water separation is at a level of magnitude is hard to imagine.

Hydrogen is familiar, but it has failed to live up to its reputation as it has been based on fossil fuels, that now needs to change.

Hydrogen has been around for years. We use Hydrogen today for oil-refining and chemical production. The problem is this hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels that have significant CO2 emissions. We have had hydrogen piped into our homes, offered as the alternative aviation solution, that lives always in association with the Hindenburg disaster.

So what makes it different this time?

We are in search of a clean ‘green’ energy source that can complement our other renewable energy sources of wind and solar. We need a dispatchable carbon-neutral source of power that can bridge, supplement and compliment when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. This is separating water into Hydrogen that gives us the potential solution.

In everything, you read Hydrogen can be the replacement “kid” for our energy supplies; in our building and heating solutions, for solving hard-to-abate industry sectors like iron and steel, chemicals and base agriculture. Hydrogen can be a fuel of the future for transport including cars, trucks, shipping and aviation.

Hydrogen seems to be the sectoral gift from heaven, water is abundant, all we need to do is separate the hydrogen out from the oxygen and turn it into reusable energy. Easy right?

Hydrogen is our decarbonization solution

You can get this sense of a Hydrogen as the best panacea for Decarbonizing the World. From what I have read and it has been a lot recently, I want to believe it, yet everything is currently couched in “It is technically feasible” or “ambitious, but achievable.” We have a considerable range of technically feasible or viable solutions. However, all the different “Hydrogen roadmaps” keep making you feel you are still only closer to the starting off point and not to the end result, we require in this next thirty to forty years if we can decarbonize our planet as we need too.

The sheer number of projects on a feasibility path to validate, prove, pilot, and understand the issues and barriers around Hydrogen are mind-boggling to follow. There are so many that look to be exciting, challenging and worthwhile

Today there are a number of countries all fleshing out their Hydrogen Strategies or pathways. Australia, Germany, the UK, the EU, the US, China all are developing their thinking and building the wider ecosystem of stakeholders to give these intentions with Hydrogen a greater momentum.

Reality often tells a different story

We need an awful lot of Hydrogen to replace our fossil fuels, to power our electricity grids, to decarbonize all the current sectors of our economy that have built their reliance on fossil fuels and have given ongoing focus to driving efficiencies and costs of fuel inputs into known models that work.

Hydrogen is yet to be proven, certainly, at scale as well as a range of applications or processes. Presently Hydrogen is far more expensive as a source of energy than existing energy sources. We would need to radically build a supporting Hydrogen infrastructure as it is to a large degree highly disruptive to the existing infrastructure, supply chains, and market acceptance. We need to resolve this to make it commercially viable.

Getting at simply releasing hydrogen from anything is an ongoing challenge. It needs different technology applications at scale. It does not matter if it is from fossil-based related sources (gas, coal, or oil)  that are the past routes of generation, or the one everyone is in hot pursuit of for the future, from water separation (H2O) to make clean energy of H2.

Turning Water into Wine, well OK Hydrogen

Water is the environmentally friendly Hydrogen that does not “release” carbon dioxide as you break down water (h2O) into the separate components of oxygen and hydrogen. This is a holy grail for our carbon-free world; the use of our abundant supply of water to separate out the hydrogen we need to drive our energy systems of the future. It is going to take an enormous amount of Electrolyzers to be operating and these will need to be way beyond their current size and capacity.

The exciting prospects of combining wind and solar power with water and hydrogen does, in theory, offer the solutions we need to get our world onto a net-zero carbon pathway. The reality is it is a thirty to forty-year slog, one that is hard and can only be achieved in a steady, well-thought-through way and across so much “unknown terrain” with difficulty and determination. It is a long exhausting journey to make Hydrogen the new energy source, it needs an alignment of so much.

Hydrogen needs Global Commitment

Today Hydrogen, the green gas is on shaky ground. The wisdom of many is it provides the only feasible answer to achieve our net-zero carbon emission world.

To achieve the vision of powering our world with green energy needs “all the stars to align”.

We need Governments to clear the pathway to this potential. That means tearing down many of today’s ‘accepted ‘ market conditions, to allow Hydrogen to effectively compete. They need to find ways to reduce subsidies on present fossil fuels or their infrastructure and manage the transition from “dirty, carbon-emitting fuels into clean, renewable-based fuels” and that is a difficult path to navigate through in energy security, cost, constantly changing and increasing energy demand and making sure those future decisions offer increased sustainability and ‘returns’ that constantly deliver growth, new job opportunities to replace those that will be displaced by this energy shift.

Research, development, technology, and innovation are all needed

We need research and development across the whole spectrum of solutions that cover all the sectoral pathways. Electrolysis, storage & fuel cell development are the unlocking keys. Once we get at the hydrogen separation, we can pursue all the cross-cutting technologies for improving fuel cells, improve clean-burning energy and develop storage solutions, build-out infrastructures, make more synthetic fuels and use cleaner hydrogen inputs into the industrial processes.

The real breakthrough in R&D is to find more radical technology design to enable the cost of scale to kick in. The more we create the demand the scaling efficiencies can drop, the pricing of solutions drop. They get closer and closer to the alternative energy and process alternatives. The path of scale is similarly predicted to be like solar, and wind costs have dramatically dropped over the years.

As Hydrogen becomes increasingly attractive to use, the application solutions begin to become validated as switching (costs) get re-evaluated as competitive and desirable. Desirable based on green energy solutions and not polluting ones based on fossil fuels. Zero carbon emissions are the endpoint for all and proven Hydrogen solutions that do scale become highly attractive.

How to get to this projected land of Zero-carbon emissions?

There is a long hard path to travel. Hydrogen needs to prove it can be scaled up, it needs to be attractive in cost to convinced present users, reliant on other fuels to invest in the switch. We need to balance Green Hydrogen through harnessing Renewables (wind, solar) to be able to live alongside Blue Hydrogen, which uses steam reformed natural gas with CCUS solutions. We need real solutions for this Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage as well that can handle the volume and difficulties associated with this. I will be looking more in CCUS in the coming weeks.

Green and Blue Hydrogen have to find the complementary pathway over the next fifty or so years They need to combine to reduce grey hydrogen, currently the one used in those hard-to-abate sectors (iron, steel, chemicals) and replace its principal sources of fuel coal and oil and stop the Carbon dioxide emissions, by at least making it Blue with Carbon Capture.

I want to believe we can get Hydrogen really going in its momentum

I think I am at that point of the more I research Hydrogen and try to understand, the harder it is in knowing the true and feasible pathway and what it is really is. Hydrogen promises so much, will it be realized?

The amount of hype mixed with valuable insights is like separating hydrogen from oxygen, we must do it. All of the Hydrogen potentials seem feasible, but our capacity to scale these out in a logical clear way and make the necessary investments is so mired by our inability to offer a clear pathway for Hydrogen; this needs to be put into place and clarified.

We are at the beginning of a decade for Hydrogen, we need to traverse the Hydrogen landscape. We have on the horizon a fixed set of goals to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, but all those hills that we will need to navigate are hard when you are still caught in the valley.

The post Believing in Hydrogen first appeared on Innovating the Energy Transition.

source of image: https://www.thegpsc.org/knowledge-sector/integrated-urban-planning

I strongly relate to Smart Cities or Smart Infrastructure as the grouping area within businesses, focusing on the Edge, delivering energy transmission to the final delivery point for residential, mobility or commercial needs.

There is so much potential in technology currently being invested in our cities and their infrastructures. There are many estimates of this investment, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, they estimated that cities around the world would need to double current infrastructure investments from $10 to $20 trillion annually, to build the necessary physical infrastructure to support growing populations and needs[1].

So often, the focus tends to be on physical or urban infrastructure, but the importance of social support needs equal attention.

To deliver the promise of digitally “smart” infrastructure does need the combination of physical and social infrastructure combining, to leverage all that can be made possible in innovative urban development, as this achieves the outcome of building a city open, inclusive, and delivering solutions to realize societal benefits.

The critical issue is achieving community engagement.

If we do not recognize the equal importance of social infrastructure, then we can face a potentially divided and polarised environment in which no amount of technology on its own can resolve. To make it inclusive, we need awareness and understanding.

This engagement needs to embrace all those that live in our smart cities of the future; the old, disabled, disenfranchised, homeless, vulnerable, marginalized, those rich or poor, all need to be broken down of the many “enclaves” we see today.

For a city’s citizens to value technology, they must relate to it, to appreciate it is contributing to their lives. Often this is referred to as a “quality of life” need.

The solutions for any contemporary urban city need to be engaging for all.

They need to unite communities; they need to provide a sense of identity where “advantage and benefit” are widely shared and seen but still value diversities that often make cities vibrant and attractive places to be living in.

The end solutions in cities should not only be “smart” but be intelligently applied

Citizen engagement is not just an end solution; it is an inclusive one from the very first moment any planning for change takes place. Cities will not engage communities if citizens feel you are disrupting, even destroying, long-standing relationships, and community spaces. Citizens need to relate and will ask: “what are the cost and disruptions, and will these be outweighed by the (eventual) benefits?”

City planners cannot make the mistake of offering binary choices of “accept or refuse,” they need to continually engage and communicate the value to the city, the cost to the citizen in “concrete” ways.

It is the partnership from inception that can bring citizen engagement and growing recognition that the changes, disruptive as they are initially, will bring economic and social benefits to their lives. It is articulating the case and giving it meaning and value.

Today we are providing outcomes of smart city investment.

The emphasis may be on City Smart solutions for infrastructure and systems, but increasingly citizen-centric smart solutions are as important; these give a greater connection and engagement. The provision of apps covering civic-engagement, digitalization of citizen services, bike and car sharing, smart parking, digital payments on public transport, private e-hailing, the arrival time of public transportation, and many others show tangible outcomes.

These solutions outlined above directly benefit the citizen; they can begin to appreciate the value of the investments made as ‘it’ relates to them. The more a citizen ‘sees,’ they will relate.

Smart city solutions are delivering real-time public transit info, road navigations apps, food ordering options, volunteering opportunities. Then as technology takes hold, we have the potential for the exceptional ability to share understanding, in health applications, water consumption, and electricity usage can be real-time in personal monitoring and control.

We can have greater control over home energy as the solutions connect into the utility providers and e-payment options. The end-user becomes a more active participant and influencer, getting more actively engaged in their consumption management.

The more significant benefits of the smart city are economical and social

For example, as cities improve their transport infrastructure, the critical aims are lowering congestion and pollution through more optimal use of technology. It is the ability to co-ordinate faster actions at times of emergency or in public safety threats through real-time analysis of sensor and surveillance cameras, better diagnostics, using artificial intelligence, and databases have high societal value for feeling safe and secure.

The ability to embed sensors and devices into the very fabric of commercial buildings, transport, homes, and factories, allows for putting a “smartness” through the data collected, monitored, and then analyzed to optimize those assets in there efficiency and effectiveness to more significant benefit.

Another level of engagement for citizens comes from a smart connected environment where they can search and find more dynamic groups of likeminded citizens to work together on collective interests. Citizens that they can help shape and form through a growing co-creation of decision making, digital democracy, and increase exchanges in a more participatory form of city governance.

As knowledge understanding forms the backbone of these engagements, the real potential of relating to data and information comes from the focused interventions that allow citizens to be more participatory in measuring the evidence of effectiveness, that openness will give all a growing sense of shared identity.

To deliver on this transformation to a “Smart City,” the promises need to provide tangible benefits or differences. Technology alone can make things better, but it is the combination with people that delivers the Smart payback. It is the marrying of both physical and social infrastructure into Smart Infrastructure as the central key, to engage communities, and connect citizens into any disruptive urban change.

Citizen engagement is essential to realize in our Smart Cities. A citizen who feels empowered determines so much of where their Smart City is going and what it means to them.

[1] Dobbs, Richard, et al., Urban World: Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class, Report, McKinsey Global Institute, June

2012, https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/urbanization/urban-world-cities-and-the-rise-of-the-consuming-class

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Smart Grids are part of the Smart Infrastructure approach in our need for complete Urban Transitions currently being undertaken. Let me try to step back here and give some broader understanding of “smart grids”

Firstly there is a need and push to changing the Energy Systems we have installed to be more responsive, adaptable and flexible.

There is a considerable movement to a very different way of power consumption presently going on. A move that brings the end customer into the equation far more than in the past, through the development of Smart Energy Grids.

The electric power system is undergoing a radical transformation worldwide, firstly with the decarbonize electricity supply, in replacing aging assets and transforming control with new information and communication technologies (ICT).

A smart grid system is self-sufficient electricity network system based on digital automation technology for monitoring, control, and analysis within the supply chain, connected into the (national) grid. Being smart it is increasingly providing electrical power from multiple sources of energy, increasing renewable energy sources, including wind turbines, solar power systems, and biomass. Smart grid technology is to provide easy integration and reliable service to the consumers

The Smart Grid has opened Energy distribution up in radical ways.

The Smart Grid is presently being built, more from a bottom-up movement to handle today’s demands, driven by digitalization, where we are all becoming reliant on computerized equipment and technology, where energy is essential to be “on” at all times. Our world has become a connected one and energy keeps it “turned on.”

Transitioning from the past centralized energy grids into decentralized ones

The “grid” refers to the electric grid, a network of transmission lines, substations, transformers and more that deliver electricity from the power plant to your home or business. In the past, energy grids were all about utilities managing their infrastructure, protecting their assets and responding to any ‘outage’ as quickly as humanly possible.

The past way was to manage energy by a central generation source, that put in place the distributed system where consumers or customers were designated as ‘just’ a receiver of energy services, trapped often by one monopolistic provider.

Energy supply, through this non-participative dialogue, became a general expectancy that “you flip the switch” and supply would be instantly available. The problems with this one-way flow of energy management have been increasingly under pressure for some time.

Energy supply has been reliant on decade-old infrastructure approaches; it became over time a ‘patchwork’ network that always needed to keep being repaired, added to, or fixed, to keep it going. The concept of the energy grid needed modernizing as it was not keeping pace with the increased variance in demands.

Many energy grids today are becoming highly vulnerable, not just to manage increasingly sudden “peak demands” but was having to deal frequently with outages and emergencies from increasingly severe storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, as well as increased risk of terrorist or security attacks.

The shift  is towards “Smart Grids.”

To move towards a different energy grid, we needed a new kind of electric grid, known today as the “Smart Grid.”

What goes into a Smart Grid?

A smart grid works like the internet or your smartphone. It allows for two-way communication between the utility, through the energy ‘transmission structure’ to the customer. By having this grid digitally connected through the transmission structure, the technology and the equipment infrastructure works together to give a responsive environment to adapt changing electric demand, detect and minimize outage when equipment fails, or requirements alter.

Also, this is not a one-way “flow” as in the past from energy supply to customer. There is a whole new “distributed generation” where customer-owned or community-owned generators can produce their energy and contribute any excess generated back into the grid.

This dramatic change in the energy business model has opened the potential for “home-grown electricity” that complements and augments energy supplied through the primary grid. The ability to generate and sell back into the grid allows the customer to play an increasing part in optimizing the operating system and reducing their costs.

Exciting new solutions are emerging, three examples being:

Solutions are emerging to offer “zero-net-energy commercial buildings” that can balance energy generation and conservation through smart grid technology approaches.

We see the pioneering of energy storage through Smart Grid Technologies with thermal storage or hybrid air conditioning for influencing peak load demands, and we have the growing potential of lithium-ion batteries for PHEV applications.

The ability to improve on the sensors enables more power to flow over existing lines, and along with continued improvements in superconducting cables, there is potential to reduce losses and carry 3-5 times more power than traditional copper-based cable.

In summary, a smart grid can deliver a dramatically different energy environment

A smart grid employs innovative products and services together with intelligent monitoring, control, communication, and self-healing technologies to:

1. Better facilitate the connection and operation of generators of all sizes and technologies.
2. Allow consumers to play a part in optimizing the operation of the system.
3. Provide consumers with greater information and options for how they use their supply.
4. Significantly reduce the environmental impact of the whole electricity supply system.
5. Maintain or even improve the existing high levels of system reliability, quality, and security of supply.
6. Maintain and improve existing services efficiently.
7. Apply digital processing and communication across power grids
8. Allow data to flow and gives information management a more central role to make “energy smart.”

The Smart Grid comprises everything related to the electric system in between any point of generation and any point of consumption, so the grid becomes more flexible, responsive, and interactive and from this improves the system by providing real-time feedback that improves efficiencies and effectiveness.

Source of reference https://www.iec.ch/smartgrid/background/explained.htm>

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