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Simulation Digital Twin: The Potential to Overcome Uncertainty on the Electric Grid

Simulation Digital Twin: The Potential to Overcome Uncertainty on the Electric Grid

Controlling systemic risks and uncertainty is a major challenge for complex systems such as power grids and places some of these players at the forefront of using technologies to anticipate the future. RTE, the French electricity transmission network and the largest in Europe, is one of them and among the most advanced in terms of applying simulation to asset management strategy.

In this exclusive interview, Gabriel Bareux, RTE’s R&D Director, and Serge Blumental, Head of RTE’s R&D Asset Management program, explain how simulation digital twins can help enable robust asset management and investment strategies and share their vision to ensure a grid that is environmentally sustainable and resilient to shocks.

ANTICIPATING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

It used to be that electricity grid asset management strategies were assessed on two broad aspects: economic viability and network reliability. Bareux and Blumental explain how taking into account the environmental impact of the grid and its management is transforming RTE’s approach. Whether it’s raw material consumption, electrical losses that lead to indirect greenhouse gas emissions, environmental costs of breakdowns, digital twin simulations coupled with parametric life cycle analyses are essential to understand and anticipate the multifactorial impacts of asset management decisions on the network.

ANTICIPATING NETWORK ROBUSTNESS IN UNCERTAIN WEATHER

The electricity grid is critical infrastructure in any country; if it fails because of a weather event – even briefly – the effects are marked and immediate. Bareux and Blumental list just some of the impacts: transportation networks collapse, water distribution networks fail, hospitals descend in chaos, and financial transactions come to a halt. Grid operators like RTE have a duty to prepare for and guard against weather-related impacts whether short-term local floods or long-term global climate change. Digital twins make it possible to anticipate the network’s robustness no matter how uncertain the weather and climate might be.

ROBUST INVESTMENT STRATEGIES UNDER UNCERTAINTY

For Bareux and Blumental, the long-term evolution of the electricity sector is anything but certain. The fundamental elements of any long-term forecast – the load, the generation capacity, transmission, distribution, and even storage – are increasingly blurry, even for industry experts. The rise of renewables, of distributed energy resources, a cleaner and greener energy mix, and shifts in government regulation are all going to shape the sector, but how? Complex simulation is a great help to make robust long term investments on the grid in such an uncertain future.

NEW FRONTIERS FOR DIGITAL TWINS

Simulation Digital twins are not only helping industry experts like Bareux and Blumental address the challenges of long term asset management. They will allow us to search for a global optimum between potentially contradictory issues. For example, between the issues of network operation, which aims at maximizing network safety in real time and thus avoiding the removal of structures, and the issues of maintenance, which requires these removals to avoid long-term failures. This coupling of models, taking into account different businesses at different ranges of time is indeed a new frontier for digital twins.

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