Electricity grids were designed over a century ago for an energy system made up of relatively few, large, centralized, controllable power plants, with very predictable power flows from the power plants to the cities to consumers. But as the energy transition unfolds, with hundreds of millions of distributed and intermittent solar panels, windmills, electric vehicles, batteries… power flow dynamics become bidirectional and much more complex, and an unprecedented number of bottlenecks, congestions and stability challenges are emerging in electricity distribution grids. These grid bottlenecks are already the number one cause of delays and cancellations of renewable energy projects and electrification projects in Europe and most of the world.
Efficiently hosting and integrating all these new complexity in Europe’s grids requires the shift to a completely “new generation of network technology” (similar to the one that happened in the Telecom sector three decades ago by moving from analogue telephony to digital telephony and GSM). Plexigrid is developing this “new generation of network technology” to make Europe grids fit for the energy transition. Plexigrid's technology is built on a digital twin that is the
most advanced and fastest on the market, years ahead of its competitors.
How does Plexigrid technology solve bottlenecks without increasing grid capacity? Instead of increasing grid capacity on the supply side (which would cost hundreds of billions of euros and years of work), Plexigrid can do it on the demand side, adapting flexible demand to available grid capacity, ten times cheaper and ten times faster than the traditional approach.
Its innovative technology is based on a real-time digital twin of the entire grid infrastructure that is built by connecting to grid operators' legacy grid control systems (smart metering systems, geographic information systems and SCADA systems), and providing an additional layer of grid intelligence that enhances these legacy systems and provides grid operators with the three superpowers they need to enable the energy transition, namely:
1. REAL-TIME VISIBILITY of what happens in each and every node of the grid, down low voltage and to household level, in networks with millions of nodes. Currently distribution grid operators have limited to zero real time visibility under 20kV infrastructure, which is where they have 90% of the kilometres of cables and nodes, where most of the new EVs, solar panels, batteries, heat pumps are being deployed.
2. REAL-TIME ANALYTICS, such as for example the computation of power flows and state estimation in grids with millions of nodes. Again, grid operators have only real-time analytics up to 20kV voltage level, but not below.
3. REAL-TIME ACCESS TO AND ORCHESTRATION OF FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION, consumption and demand of millions of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, etc…
Plexigrid have been developing their digital twin for years, even before the company was founded. It is the most robust, accurate and fastest digital twin that has ever existed for distribution networks, combining analytical methods with artificial intelligence techniques that allow it to adapt to changing environments, loss of data and even errors or lack of knowledge in the layout of power lines.
While other competitors add conventional mathematical models as a patch to legacy platforms claiming to have a digital twin, Plexigrid's platform has been designed to rest on this digital twin and all modules have been designed for ultra-fast interfacing with, combining analytical techniques with artificial intelligence since the moment of its creation. Achieving performance and accuracy levels similar to those of Plexigrid would require our competitors to completely refactor their platforms, which is a task that could take years.
