Visualize This: A Smarter Approach to Managing Renewable Energy
By Jim McIntosh, Director-Executive Operations Advisor, the California ISO and Krishna Kumar, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Space- Time InsightTracking Renewables Adds to Information Overload
TThe ISO is a non-profit public benefit corporation that manages the bulk of California's power grid and its wholesale electricity market. The ISO opened in 1998 as a result of the restructuring of the state's electricity industry. The ISO is charged with operating the power grid openly and transparently. As the world's eighth largest economy, California is an economic engine for the entire U.S., and the role of the ISO is to ensure the state always has the power it needs to keep running. The ISO manages electricity flow for 80 percent of California's power grid, delivering 286 billion kilowatthours annually over 25,000 miles of power lines for about 35 million Californians. Given this scale, ISO operators who were previously analyzing data in a traditional tabular format, often found it challenging to spot trends and anomalies, and respond quickly to changing conditions, especially given the influx of data points necessary to track an increasing number of renewable sources. In addition, because the ISO relied on independent software systems and processes across different disciplines, sharing and synchronizing information was often complex and time consuming. This challenge has been compounded over the years because California has one of the world's most aggressive agendas for addressing climate change, and as part of that, the state is seeing rapid development of various wind and solar facilities, along with other intermittent resources. The ISO needs to be able to keep very close track of these variable resources in order to achieve the right balance between using renewables and ensuring reliable power. The ISO is faced with an increasingly common issue in the power industry and many other industries as well - a growing mountain of information to assimilate. How can an organization integrate and analyze more and more complex data in an efficient manner? How can it turn all that data into useful information? The California ISO sought a technology solution as it modernized its control centers and advanced visualization displays turned out to be the answer. New computer applications provide information in pictures rather than thousands of information points, making it easier to display multiple layers of data in a faster-to-consume manner. 26 ElectricEnergy T&D MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2011 Issue The California Independent System Operator's (ISO) new control center houses the first dedicated renewables dispatch facility in the nation, and what makes this facility unique is a new grid visualization technology powered by advanced geospatial software. This technology enables dispatchers to adjust in real-time to current weather conditions, while enhancing wind and solar performance forecasting. Overall, it helps the ISO maintain a reliable flow of renewable power, an economic imperative in California, and sets the stage for the state to achieve its goal of generating 33 percent of its power from renewable resources by 2020.
You need to upgrade your Flash Player
You need to upgrade the version of your Flash Player to version 9 minimum.
Click here
Adobe Flash Player Download Center