Digital twin for Wales electricity grid
A digital twin is to be created of the Welsh electricity grid to model and maximise the renewable generation capacity.
Under the project name ‘Powering Wales renewably’, Britain’s National Grid Electricity Transmission, the electricity system operator (ESO), and National Grid Electricity Distribution along with the Welsh government and consulting firm CGI have been awarded funding for the Wales’ electricity system digital twin.
With the digital twin, which will be across both the transmission and distribution networks, the project partners intend to support the Welsh nation’s decarbonisation plans.
These include meeting at least 70% of Wales’ electricity requirements with renewables by 2030 and the government and public sector itself achieving net zero by that date.
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Carolina Tortora, Head of Innovation Strategy and Digital Transformation at the ESO, explains in a column for Business News Wales that digital twin technology has the power to equip Wales with a whole-system view of its electricity transmission and distribution networks, enabling a wealth of opportunities.
“The system will help partners identify how networks can enable greater use of Welsh renewable electricity from a whole system perspective, aiding the progress in delivering the Welsh government’s decarbonisation goals,” she writes in the editorial feature.
Using this whole electricity system approach, the project partners intend to collaboratively identify innovation priorities to increase the renewable electricity hosting capacity and facilitate their swifter deployment and that of other connections for low carbon technologies whilst delivering net benefits to Wales’s citizens and their communities.
Among these the government has targeted at least 1GW of renewable energy capacity to be locally owned by 2030.
As a first-of-its-kind system in Wales, it also represents the potential for access to novel system support by enabling flexibility coordination across the whole electricity system, reducing renewable energy curtailment and facilitating constraint management.
The ESO is leading the Virtual Energy System programme to create a real time digital replica of Britain’s entire energy landscape made up of connected digital twins.
This Welsh digital twin project as the first of its kind should help demonstrate the benefits of such interoperable digital twins with Wales as an at-scale geographic location.
The project is funded through the Strategic Innovation Fund, which is managed jointly by the regulator Ofgem and Innovate UK.
In this first ‘Discovery phase’, the project’s challenges and aims will be established.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.