GE Digital announced its existing customer National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) has deployed the software company’s Effective Inertia Metering & Forecasting solution in production across Great Britain’s electricity network.
The GE Digital solution is designed to deliver capabilities to inform National Grid ESO’s management and engineers of grid inertia day-to-day to help ensure the system can handle a worst-case generator loss.
GE Digital’s Effective Inertia Metering & Forecasting solution, built on GE Digital’s energy platform for Wide Area Management (WAMS) applications, provides confidence to operators about the margin and risk of their current and planned inertia positions.
With analytics services, Effective Inertia Metering & Forecasting measures the combined inertia-like effects of rotating machines, passive load responses, and active generator controls. The metering function is non-intrusive, just software, with no injection of forced stimulation or additional hardware into the network.
The project featured a staged delivery with incremental software releases and close week-by-week collaboration between GE and National Grid ESO. This enabled rapid feedback and adaptation, helping to navigate external dependencies – such as links to external energy forecast systems – leading to successful acceptance testing of the new solution.
With real-time inertia metering now live for more than 200 days and inertia forecasting for a number of weeks across the Scotland region of the Great Britain grid, all that remains is to install additional Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) in a handful of remaining substations to complete the Great Britain regional inertia picture.
“This tool will improve the ESO’s ability to manage system stability across the entire network as more renewable energy sources connect to the grid,” said Julian Leslie, Head of Networks at National Grid ESO.
To avoid issues, some operators have to manage inertia on a regional basis. They can also deploy fast-acting Wide Area Control schemes like those being deployed by GE Digital at Landsnet in Iceland and Australia. Such schemes act in less than a second to stabilize a grid following a disturbance.
“Modernizing the power grid with technologies like Effective Inertia Metering & Forecasting help operators like National Grid ESO balance and stabilize renewables on the grid, optimize operations, and reduce costs and carbon in an increasingly complex ecosystem,” said Jim Walsh, General Manager of GE Digital’s Grid Software business.