About the Topic

DER hosting capacity analysis is conducted by utilities to determine how much additional DER (like EV and solar PV) its distribution grid infrastructure can accommodate, or "host," without approaching its physical limits (like thermal overloads and voltage violations).

This analysis is performed in a "snapshot" fashion, preparing offline models and simulations to calculate static hosting capacity values. These values can be informative to a utility's distribution system planning efforts, and increasingly, these values are being visualized and published for the benefit of external stakeholders, like utility customers, energy developers, charge point operators (CPOs), and regulators.

To date, nearly 50 North American utilities have launched hosting capacity maps to broaden transparency to their distribution networks. The US Department of Energy has developed a list of these maps, located here: U.S. Atlas of Electric Distribution System Hosting Capacity Maps

While hosting capacity maps can be useful tools for the planning and siting of energy infrastructure, their static nature means the temporal and spatial granularity they offer do not satisfy operational needs (e.g., the hosting capacity of a substation, feeder, feeder segment, or service transformer may all change differently over the course of a day, depending on dynamic grid conditions).

To operationalize hosting capacity, the concept of dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) has been developed, with origins traced to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). ARENA defines DOEs as an "allocation of the available hosting capacity to individual or aggregate DER or connection points within a segment of an electricity distribution network in each time interval (usually 5 or 30 minutes)." This allocation does not yet have a standardized methodology or formula, so utilities have developed a range of approaches, largely driven by the nature of their own service territories and their IT/OT infrastructure maturity (e.g., availability and quality of distribution asset data).

In this Event, the Darcy research team will first provide an overview of hosting capacity analysis (HCA), its adoption across North America, and the tools used in the process. Then, Brendan Banfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Gridsight will provide an overview of dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) as a concept, and further, Gridsight's own approach to conducting the analysis and operationalizing it for its utility partners.

About the Innovator

Gridsight is a low-voltage visibility and hosting capacity management platform for distribution network operators. The company specializes in generating actionable reports that enable engineers to understand the impact of DERs on their network and its integrity. This allows networks to become proactive and data-driven in managing their distribution network. Gridsight achieves this by ingesting disparate network data from available sources (smart meters, transformer monitors, GIS), applying data science and machine learning algorithms across the data, and presenting these insights in their web platform to assist grid management and operation including fault detection, identification of non-compliant DER, customer to transformer mapping, identifying overloaded network assets and dynamic operating envelope calculation.