Video: Counties Energy’s DSO milestone allows ‘active energy orchestration’ including EV charging

Counties Energy has achieved a major milestone in its programme to demonstrate an end-to-end operating model capable of active capacity and flexibility management with granular smart meter and low voltage (LV) electricity network data, with the aim of accelerating the company’s customer-centric transition to a distributed system operator (DSO).

The DSO milestone, believed to be the first of its kind in New Zealand, studied more than 500 customer ICPs on Counties Energy’s LV network in Karaka Harbourside, near Papakura.

The project is a collaboration between Counties Energy, OpenLoop, Europe-based Plexigrid and Ara Ake.

The aim is to develop and demonstrate how different technology platforms, like granular smart metering, EV charging control and LV network intelligence can integrate, and seamlessly deliver the DSO operating model in a New Zealand context.

This milestone has used Plexigrid’s platform to take granular voltage, frequency and electricity consumption data from Counties Energy’s smart meters and LV network data, data collected every five minutes and sent to the Data Lake part of the DSO platform, generating fast and accurate insights, analytics and reporting.

This level of speed, granularity, accuracy and reliability of data has been possible through Counties Energy’s relationship with smart meter and energy data provider Intellihub.

The data is then available to specialist DSO engineers to simulate different network and active orchestration scenarios such as power quality issues, impact of hot water load and heat pump management, EV charging and solar PV uptake.

High-quality granular data paired with a powerful intelligence engine on the LV network will enable customers to accelerate their decarbonisation journey.

The programme’s next milestone will go further to use the intelligent DSO platform in an in-field pilot later this year, the core of which is based on learnings from South Australia Power

Network’s (SAPN’s) and their implementation of Dynamic Operating Envelopes (DOEs) using the IEEE 2030.5 protocol.

Post trial, Counties Energy plans to offer DSO services via distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators and use flexibility management as an effective energy orchestration solution.

Counties Energy Group chief strategy and transformation officer Moonis Vegdani says the successful trial of 500 households changes the game in New Zealand in terms of understanding how to actively orchestrate energy on a distribution network.

“The five-minute smart metering and granular LV network data, together with the energy orchestration DSO operating model is the next generation of electricity distribution services,” he says.

“These capabilities will be hugely important in understanding how people use electricity in their homes and actively managing infrastructure capacity in near real-time, ultimately resulting in achieving greater efficiency in the system.

“It will also enable us to determine how we can incorporate greater electricity demands from EV charging, bi-directional charging and roof-top solar generation.”  

Vegdani says the ultimate goal is to deliver ‘flex and stretch on the network’ through active orchestration, enabling shared value with customers and ensuring it all happens safely within the available

infrastructure capacity.

Plexigrid co-founder and chief executive Alberto Mendez Rebollo says the successful demonstration of its technology will help Counties Energy operate its distribution network in a far more

intelligent, economic and sustainable manner.

Ara Ake chief executive Dr Cristiano Marantes says that it’s great to see progress being made, as the Counties Energy and Plexigrid project came out of the Ara Ake Electricity Distribution Business Challenge.

Additional Counties Energy projects include a soon-to-be-launched berm battery utilising second-life EV batteries, EV fast charging solutions, smart vehicle-to-grid technology and the Electricity Engineers’ Association (EEA) Flextalk project.

The next programme milestone is due to start in April and will see Counties Energy continue with its implementation of Plexigrid’s platform together with its EV charging service provider OpenLoop.