Pushing Distribution Grid Analytics to the Edge Opportunities, Challenges and Best Practices

The proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) is perceived as both a challenge and an opportunity for electric utilities. DER integration necessitates the distribution companies’ ability to manage the two-way flow of power, handle increased energy usage uncertainty, and address potentially thermal overload or voltage issues to ensure DERs do not cause grid constraints. A vast amount of high-resolution voltage and current sensors, distribution automation devices, and control edge devices have also been deployed across the distribution system in most recent years to enable high-fidelity monitoring and control of distribution operations with DERs. However, it is very challenging to transmit real-time data to a central control center for information processing or advanced analytics because the traditional centralized computing paradigm puts high requirements for both the communication and on-prem computing infrastructure of the distribution companies. Edge computing, by contrast, shifts the computation workload from a centralized location to the edge, which greatly reduces the amount of data that need to be transmitted and thus lowers the requirements for communication network bandwidth and centralized computing resources. The panel will discuss the opportunities, challenges, and best practices upon how to facilitate the industry with faster and reliable distribution analytics using edge computing.