Episode 184 | Demand Dynamics | Energy Exemplar
Imagine a grid operator or a utility planner from fifteen years ago. If they were transported to the present, they may not recognize the energy landscape. Renewables providing a majority of generation, data centers and EVs increasing demand. Net-zero carbon targets. The mix of new generation and new load has increased the complexity of the grid substantially. How can anyone plan for the future?
Utah-based Energy Exemplar has been providing solutions since 1999. Today they help clients from over 80 countries optimize their energy systems. These clients can range from electric utilities and grid operators, to energy traders and power plant manufacturers.
"We enable people to look out seconds, years, decades into the future and understand what's the right things to build, sell, retire, and how to operate them in the near term,” says Energy Exemplar CEO David Wilson. David says their clients may run millions of hours of models per month—everything from what days are windy to the loss of a transmission line.
I was curious how much AI is used in this process. "We model every asset in the grid and the physics of that,” says David. “Once we've done that, we can then train A.I.'s and other machine learning models as well to help speed up getting answers.”
He says renewables have unique economic qualities. First, they don’t consume fuel, so there’s no operating costs.
"The rise of renewables is an incredible change to the energy landscape, driven primarily by the incredible cost reductions in solar and wind over the last two years."
When solar is producing an excess of energy, prices for electricity can be near zero. David says even if solar energy is curtailed, that may not necessarily be a bad thing.
That leaves questions about what to do about demand. While electric vehicles are not ubiquitous, he anticipates they will be a significant factor, especially when it comes to balancing the load.
“There's scenarios in Australia and some of the European markets where they manage this through incentives and even handing over control of the charging overnight to a third party,” says David. “There can be incentives around that, even to the point of basically getting free energy at certain hours of the day to charge.”
A lot of things to consider indeed. Luckily, there are tools to help make sense of our evolving energy landscape.
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