Distributed Energy
Distributed Energy
Managing an
Intelligent
Energy Future
It’s not just utilities that must adapt to the world of distributed
energy. Intelligent energy management, the connection of
­different grids, and innovative storage solutions are issues for
almost anyone consuming or producing power.
Text: Marc Engelhardt Illustration: Cajsa Holgersson
G
Combined (Cooling)
Heat & Power
Storage
Onshore
Wind Park
Pumped Hydro
Private
Wind &
­Solar
PV Plant
Large-Scale
PV Plant
Electric Vehicle Infrastructure
Storage
PV Plant
Transport
Onshore
Wind
Power
Station
Control­
lable
LV Transformer
Thermal
Storage
Fossil Power
Plant
Power
Station
Smart Building &
Thermal Storage
Power
Station
Building
Data Center
one are the days when power
was supplied by just a few
large power plants – when a
limited number of utilities served demand, and deterministic generation
schemes sufficed to do the job. Today,
in the age of distributed energy, many consumers are producers as well.
In the case of industrial enterprises
and other large entities, this dual role
of the prosumer is especially pronounced. To these are added the millions of individual prosumers who
feed energy produced by small engines, combined heat and power
units, wind turbines, and photovoltaic units into the grid. As a result, energy systems worldwide are experiencing changes on a previously
unknown scale, and a gradual conversion of the grid infrastructure is inevitable. Innovative energy management therefore ranks as a top priority
for utilities as well as for many other
players in industry and elsewhere.
Take load management, for example.
“A lot of generation is fed into the
grid at a low voltage level, not at transmission level,” says Ralf ­Christian,
CEO of the S
­ iemens Energy Management Division. “That means, for instance, that if you have a photovoltaic
unit and clouds pass through, you
suddenly lose all generation in that
microenvironment, and then – just
as suddenly – it comes back again.”
This happens to thousands or more
units at any given time. Accordingly,
low-voltage grids that used to be distribution-only have to be upgraded
to include sensors, measurement
technology, and other elements of a
smart grid that enable grid management at the microlevel. “Management
on a large geographic scale is no longer sufficient.”
Load management no longer takes
place only in the grid, but at the consuming industries. “In the past, you
basically had a substation, and you
could fully rely on power being available through the grid all year round,
24/7,” Christian explains. “But today,
power prices in countries like Germany
or the USA vary, so you start adapting
and making choices: when to buy
from the grid, when to generate from
your own sources, when to try to cut
off loads, and eventually, how to
manage peak demand.” In California,
for example, exceeding a certain
threshold during peak hours for just
a few minutes can cost a facility as
much as the energy consumption for
the rest of the month. “If you want to
avoid paying these premiums, you really need to be able to manage your
power supply process – you have to be
able to shift loads from one side to the
other or shut off certain consumption – and to do that, you need a lot of
measurement, sensors, monitoring,
and control within your own facility.”
The Opportunity of
­Integration
Energy management is thus moving
into power-consuming applications
as well as into buildings, infrastructure, and industrial processes. “Many
of our industry customers, for instance, now have to manage their
Living Energy · No. 12 | July 2015 65
u
Energy Management
Distributed Energy
Ralf Christian
In October 2014, 51-year-old Ralf
Christian was appointed CEO of
the Siemens Energy Management
­Division with responsibility, among
others, for infrastructure and
industry markets, as well as lowand medium-voltage technologies.
After graduating with a ­Master of
Science and Business Administration degree from the University of
Karlsruhe, Germany, he began
working with ­Siemens as a product
manager in 1989. Four years later,
he became head of product
­management and business development at the ­Siemens Drives
and Products Group.
66 Living Energy · No. 12 | July 2015
He was appointed CEO of the
Power Distribution Division in
2008; a few years later, in 2011,
he became CEO of the Low- and
Medium-Voltage business unit.
Christian was the president of
T&D Europe (the European Association of the Electricity Transmission
and Distribution Equipment and
Service Industry) between 2008
and 2014. He has served as a board
member of the German Electrical
and Electronic Manufacturers’
­Association (ZVEI) since 2011 and is
the president of its power engineering department.
commercial or industrial facilities,
from about half a megawatt-hour up
to 20 megawatt-hours of storage.”
­Moreover, storing energy for meeting
shortfalls (or hedging energy costs)
is not the only application, Christian
explains. “Siestorage is also a great
asset for stabilizing and balancing
your local grid. For some of our
­customers, that is actually its more
important function.”
Siemens,” Christian says. “For an industrial facility, a large building, a
hospital, a data center, S
­ iemens can
provide data management suites that
can be linked with components from
building technology. We have all the
basic technology to capture data, to
do power monitoring, and to collect
all the measurements in the energy
environment; then we connect them
through communication protocols
generation, and then you have to
manage load in those cities and
­prepare for scenarios, even worstcase scenarios.” Christian cites the
example of Hurricane Sandy, which
knocked out the power supply on
the US East Coast in October 2012.
“You have to make sure that even in
those extreme cases, your power
­supply is still available, safe, and
energy-efficient.”
Other Storage Options
Photo: Detlef Schneider
Ralf Christian has been the CEO of the S
­ iemens Energy Management
Division since October 2014.
own nano- or microgrid, depending
on their size,” Christian says. If energy is produced within an industrial
facility, be it with renewables, diesel
engines, or small gas turbines, monitoring is of the essence, Christian
knows. “You need to integrate your
generation with your overall facility,
with the industrial processes you
have, and these need to be tied into
building monitoring systems and industrial automation. The integration
of that whole environment will create
a lot of opportunity for business in
the next years to come.”
Tasks that, in the past, were handled
exclusively by utilities are now taken
care of by facility managers. “Think
of data centers, which need perfect
stability in their power supply: More
and more of these facilities will have
to generate their own power, and they
will face the same problems that utilities faced, though on a much smaller
scale.” Managing one facility is indeed very different from managing
an entire country’s grid, Christian
reckons. “But you still need a large
suite of technologies, and that’s
where the S
­ iemens Energy Management Division is especially well positioned.” After recent restructuring,
expertise ranging from high to low
voltage levels is now combined in one
Division, Energy Management. For
customers, that means a wide variety
of experience from different backgrounds is now available from a single source.
That is also true for one of the great
challenges of a distributed energy
­environment: storage. Because the
sun doesn’t always shine and the
wind doesn’t always blow, energy can
be stored when there’s a surplus so
that it can be used in times of need.
On the big scale, Italian transmission
system operator Terna as well as distribution system operator Enel already use ­Siemens storage solutions
in the southern parts of the country
to stabilize the grid and provide ancillary services for grid operations.
On the micro- and nanolevels of the
grid, S
­ iemens has developed the
Siestorage unit, based on lithium-ion
batteries and scaled for facility use.
“Siestorage is targeted at large
Additional storage capabilities are
available if you have the smart grids
to use them. Most cities, for instance,
have networks for gas and district
heating that can be used for storage.
In Nuremberg, Germany, not far from
the ­Siemens headquarters, a 70-meter water tower was inaugurated in
2014. It basically works like your average water heater plus thermos flask:
When there’s a surplus in energy, it’s
used to heat up to 33,000 cubic meters of water inside the tower, where
it then stays hot. That hot water is
used to feed into the district heating
network when needed. It’s only one
of many storage options. “We are providing the technologies that bridge
the still separate domains, and that
will make the management of your
city’s infrastructure more efficient,”
Christian explains.
In the USA, parked electric cars are
used as storage devices as well. The
enabling factor for all these crosssectoral solutions is a smart grid that
allows for intelligent energy management. Operations technology and information technology become one,
Christian says. “Information technology is what we need to get the meter
data and the consumer data into the
systems so that we can measure consumption and draw the necessary
conclusions. Automation technology
is needed to make the meter data
available for outage management and
outage measurement in the grids:
So this is where these two worlds converge.” All of the collected data is
stored and analyzed, to the benefit of
a stable and efficient power supply.
“In the distribution grids, the technologies needed to manage all that
data are already available within
“We are providing the technologies
that bridge the still separate domains
of energy management.”
into an overall ­Siemens building
management system.” The same
can be ­provided for industrial processes. “These are very often linked
with energy supply. Again, with
products and systems from our digital factory division, we provide the
backbone for extracting all that data from the energy system and then
use the right protocols to enable
these factories to run efficient
processes.”
Power for Resilient Cities
Cities exemplify the complexity of
interacting and communicating
grids on different levels. Since a
rapidly rising percentage of the
world population is moving to cities, more energy is needed there
to cover their needs. At the same
time, network stability has to be ensured. But since the energy infrastructures of most big cities are
up to 100 years old, it’s hard to see
how these goals can be reached.
“Again, you need to think on a significantly larger scale of management,” ­Christian says. “As an energy provider, you have to provide
choices and be more robust in
terms of power generation within
buildings or the district. Maybe you
will use combined heat and power
or photovoltaic units for
But Christian and his team are also
working out intelligent solutions for
everyday use. One challenge, in cities
as well as elsewhere, is to conceal
from public view the technical infrastructure, which has always been
anything but attractive. “That’s where
we come in with very compact medium-voltage switchgear designs, substation designs, and designs for
­high-voltage units with a very small
footprint. It’s a question of integrating this infrastructure, not just pure
beautification.” For instance, in San
Francisco some years ago, ­Siemens
designed an additional power link
bringing several 100 megawatts of
­energy to the commercial district.
“We took a cable through the Bay that
is absolutely invisible; it was simply
the best solution,” Christian says. It
is just another example of how intelligent energy management means
thinking everything through, down
to the last detail. The world of energy
will continue to experience big
changes over the next 10 to 15 years,
Christian knows – and he is proud
to work on the forefront of providing
highly innovative solutions for the
future. p
Marc Engelhardt reports from Geneva on the
UN, international organizations, and business
for various media, including Deutschlandfunk
and the German News Agency epd.
Living Energy · No. 12 | July 2015 67