AspenTech’s Digital Grid Management (DGM) team has supported a large utility in the northwestern United States since 2006 to help provide reliable, safe, and advanced real-time operations of an electric grid serving over 1.9 million people with over 21MW-hours generated and delivered across 1,250 miles of transmission line and 28,800 miles of distribution line. The utility uses AspenTech’s digital automation solutions to manage power generation, transmission, distribution and distributed energy resources (DERs).

This utility’s clean energy goals, set by their regulators, require collaboration and innovation with digital technology partners such as AspenTech. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2040 requires significant investment in large renewable generation resources as well as distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar, electric vehicle infrastructure and virtual power plants (VPPs).

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy provided funding through the Connected Communities Program for this utility to retrofit residential and commercial buildings in low- and moderate-income communities to help improve energy efficiency and add load flexibility allowing the utility to better service their network. This project is a collaboration between the utility, program delivery partners and the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) to demonstrate 1.4 MW of flexible loads by retrofitting approximately 580 buildings in the Pacific Northwest with various measures including smart thermostats, smart water heaters, high-efficiency HVAC, solar with smart inverters, storage, and managed electric vehicle charging. The goals of this project include engaging the community with a special focus on low-income and traditionally underserved residents facing gentrification, as well as demonstrating a range of flexible grid services, such as voltage management, frequency response, and bulk service provisioning.

To support this project, AspenTech has replicated a portion of the utility’s system on AspenTech’s software and deployed it at NREL where it is being integrated with NREL’s Advanced Distribution Management Systems Test Bed located in their laboratory in Golden, Colorado. This project will explore co-optimization of bulk services such as energy, capacity and frequency response, with distribution services which may include local congestion relief and power quality support such as Volt/Var optimization (VVO) or Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR). The project will also assess novel use cases and co-optimizing solar and storage with flexible loads to minimize grid exports in a controlled lab environment before being rolled out onto the utility’s system.

AspenTech’s Dr. Eric Sortomme (our Dr. DERMS) visited the NREL facilities to configure the software for the selected use cases. Dr. Annabelle Pratt, a chief engineer in NREL's Power Systems Engineering Center said, "We are excited to be part of this project that uses NREL's laboratory facilities to support the electric utility industry in de-risking field deployment of grid flexibility demonstrations."

The results of this collaboration and testing will move forward the innovation of ADMS and DERMS products from AspenTech to address the utility industry challenges of integrating renewables while utilizing DERs to improve grid health, meeting demand growth without the need for infrastructure upgrades by utilizing DERs to address grid congestion, and supporting new demand patterns, enable market participation, and maximize use of DERs across a spectrum of use cases.

The collaboration between energy and tech experts in this project will advance the digital technology utilities urgently need to manage modern energy systems. AspenTech's software will be live in NREL's facilities through 2027. If you are attending NREL’s FAST DERMS Workshop in December, keep an eye out for our system.

Figure 1: Aspen Tech's Dr. Eric Sortomme and NREL's Ismael Mendoza in front of the Aspen Tech DGM system inside NREL's ADMS Test Bed.