SMIGHT

Distribution grids are facing new challenges: EVs, heat pumps, rooftop solar, and home storage are creating unpredictable peaks and bidirectional flows that standard load profiles can’t keep up with. Our latest post shows how much real load profiles have changed – and how SMIGHT helps DSOs make this complexity visible and manageable.

Standard load profiles have been a critical part of a network planner’s toolkit for planning network expansion and creation. In the past, these profiles were well known and not all that complex and thus the planning, building, and managing of distribution networks was also unassuming. However, the likes of EV chargers, heat pumps, roof top solar, and battery storage make this topic far more complex nowadays.

To give you a bit of an idea of how big these changes are:

In the past a network planner may have worked on the basis that the peak load from an average household would be 2-3 kW. By comparison a modern EV charger can have a peak of 22kW (on top of other loads from the household) – so we are talking about a potential increase of 10x. Another way of thinking about this is that an average feeder might have around 40 households connected to it and if 3 of those houses added such an EV charger then it would be like adding around 30 houses to the street.

Another comparison is: the average household uses ca 5-10 kWh per day, and the average domestic storage capacity is around 10 kWh. So that means on any given day a household might not use the grid at all, or completely rely on the grid depending on the state of their battery.

Now let’s look at the impact of roof top solar. Before roof top solar, households never fed in electricity to the grid. Now it is not uncommon for roof top systems to have peak outputs close to 10kW (remember that an average household might have 3kW peak load in the past), and then over the course of a sunny day they can produce around 30-40 kWh of energy. So we go from a consumption only system to one where production peaks are higher than the previous consumption peaks.

Now combine all these factors together and there will be times when many factors align resulting in vary high acute loads. This presents a significant risk to the grid and has the potential to bring extremely high costs with it – either in damage to the infrastructure or in the form of huge investment costs to build out the grid to be able to cope this these occasional peaks.

So, what does the load profile look like for a street with modern houses with heat pumps, EV chargers, roof top solar, and household batteries? And what tools does a network operator have at hand to maintain a stable network under these more difficult to predict conditions?

This is where low voltage grid monitoring can give you an answer and where SMIGHT can help. At SMIGHT we help DSOs gain transparency of their low voltage networks through the roll-out of retrofittable solution for the monitoring of feeders in the LV networks. SMIGHT has well over 100,000 measuring points currently in operation and this is enabling us to build smart network planning tools based on real measurements.