Enabling Smart Energy Communities Through PEER Strategies

Developing a smart grid is all about leveraging information and communication technology to bring advancements in power system efficiency and reliability. Also, resilient enhancement is crucial for cities, communities, and campus buildings so as to provide a stable power supply for critical loads and essential services during natural disasters and major grid failures. Communities can emphasize the smart grid abilities which improves grid flexibility and provides resilient power options to the consumers. Smart grid enables greater penetration of customer’s local renewable and/or clean energy sources (Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)), coupled with energy storage helping in maximizing their electric grid reliability and resiliency. Also, DERs connected to the grid encourages the consumers’ participation in the grid services, enabling the role of prosumers. These greater abilities of smart grids will help in minimizing the transmission and distribution losses and the costs associated with it. Smart grids provide more insight into the electricity grid’s operational health with the advanced metering and cyber secure communication infrastructure, enabling automatic outage detection and service restoration, making the electric grid strong and smart. GBCI’s PEER (Performance Excellence in Electricity Renewal) is a comprehensive framework that assists any city or campus in evaluating their power system performance and encourages the adoption of new technologies that can strengthen a community’s access to reliable and resilient power. This paper talks on how PEER strategies provide a roadmap to enable smart energy communities and can facilitate the grid modernization efforts globally, through a case study.