DistribuTECH: Patrick Lee

This year, DistribuTECH International had a theme of "Experience the Energy Movement," with thirteen educational tracks and a massive exposition floor holding over five hundred booths. The PUF team met up with innovators making a difference with emerging technologies useful to the grid space.

PUF's Joe Paparello: Give an overview of your role at PXiSE Energy Solutions and how you help utilities.

Patrick Lee: I'm the executive advisor, the original co-founder and former CEO. Primarily, we enable the utility to manage and distribute resources and renewable energy, to allow them to get on a path toward a hundred percent renewable energy or zero carbon.

With the current technology available, it's kind of hit and miss, often you hear about solar moratoriums, and that the grid cannot handle more renewables. So, what we focus on is different technology that enables us to integrate and operate without fossil fuels. We have demonstrated this through a number of projects using our technology.

It's about smart energy management, and management of a mix of resources that are highly variable because traditionally, the power systems that we've been operating for the last hundred and forty years or so are all based on predictable planning, operating, and modeling.

With what we have provided, the technology to do just-in-time power control, and do it accurately, now utilities can deal with the intermittency of renewables and are enabled to adopt a higher percentage of renewable energy on their grids.

Sometimes it's difficult to explain the technology, but to give an example, before we deployed our technology in the town of Onslow in Western Australia, thirteen percent of their energy came from rooftop solar. After the deployment of PXiSE's grid control tech, they now have more than fifty-five percent of houses with rooftop solar.

PXiSE is providing an operating platform that powers three different products: a Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), Microgrid Controller, and a Renewable Power Plant Controller. A lot of times, people think each one of these are a siloed solution, but in order to achieve zero carbon, one hundred percent renewables, it has to be an integrated, coordinated deployment of technologies.

That ties in with our projects in Australia, as they're more advanced in adopting renewables, and we have projects there because they have an advanced stage of both energy storage deployment and the market operation of distributed resources.

PUF: What do you do in other environments where maybe the sun isn't always shining?

Patrick Lee: There are solar resources, wind resources, and geothermal resources. All of those are providing renewable sources of energy. There may be exceptions in some locations, but most of the earth receives energy from the sun or wind.

There are still mainstream renewable energies, and of course they'll be supplemented by geothermal and others. When you start thinking about mass production of this renewable energy, people realize because of the variability of renewables you need to store the energy, whether it's chemical, battery, hydrogen, or forms of that.

There's opportunity to focus on the key areas that have abundant resources, and help them harness it, then people can think about how to help areas of the world that have fewer available resources to move closer toward a hundred percent renewables by maximizing what they have.

PUF: Talk about environments where you have started work, some conversations you're having with utility companies, and how you might be helping those companies move along that pathway.

Patrick Lee: Particularly in the utility industry, one of the challenges is that people are still focusing on more of the macro level of renewable energy deployment. They just ask, "How much solar or how much battery do I need?"

People don't talk a lot about the variability of the resources, because the power system wasn't designed for variability. It's designed for plan, schedule, and operate. Until the penetration gets to a level that starts showing problems, people don't pay attention.

People just say, "Okay, it's there, but I only have fifteen percent penetration of renewables. I don't need to worry about any issues." But policy is driving utilities to find ways to achieve twenty, thirty, forty-five percent renewables until they are finally reaching a hundred percent or zero carbon. So, utilities will have to consider how to manage increased renewable penetration on their grids.

For the variability part, I'll give an example. When I was in Guam about four months ago, in a single day, clouds came through, in and out. We lost ninety percent of production of solar in five seconds.

Now, an island like that can't handle the loss. So, energy storage fills the gap, with what we call ramp control, to smooth out the solar and provide stored energy when the solar drops off, or store energy when solar comes back. The grid cannot handle it when suddenly the power comes back.

It's important for the industry to enable more renewable integration, because you have to be able to address the variability of renewables. That variability trickles into changes in technology adoption, changes in mindset of operation, because the grid no longer operates the way it used to work.

PUF: What about the demand side?

Patrick Lee: Demand side management fits in the overall scheme of things. Much is changing in terms of how energy is used.

Think of appliances that use electricity; it could be your refrigerator, pool pump, electric heater, in large industrial settings it could be a furnace, and some machines that are robotic. They all use electricity at varying levels throughout the day, including electric vehicle charging. That can be translated to variability because in total use, supply and demand are mixed together in the neighborhood.

It's a big challenge for the industry to manage that variability and process it in a way where they can plan for it. To do that, we rely on technology.

Once you can squeeze that energy production into an energy profile that you want and that is shareable with the other side of the grid, you have to figure out how to monetize that and get a return on investment.

Some people might plan on contracting with the local utility to sell them their excess power.

But when the utility doesn't pay much, they take their chances in the wholesale market, work with an aggregator and say, "Hey, sum up my power. When you make extra money, give it back to me as a return."

The ability to reshape how energy's used, how you monetize it, and demand response will be part of reshaping an entire energy grid. But the demand management aspect covers only a short duration for a specific time.

If you want to increase the return on investment on an energy asset that's being deployed, you have to look at it 24/7 to figure out how to decide when energy cost production is low and you want to charge or use energy, and then produce energy when the demand is high and expensive.

PUF: Talk about who's going to pay for all these upgrades to the current infrastructure that is not suitable for what's coming onto the grid.

Patrick Lee: First of all, I think your question is about who's going to invest in this? Who's responsible to provide the integration resources that are needed to help us transition to what the policymaker wants us to do?

The utility plays a role because their network is largely impacted by people adopting renewables. The utility has to invest in technology to manage the variability. But now, the utility doesn't necessarily have to invest in the resources.

We see it in the market where people say, "Hey, it's economical for me to install solar at my home or at a business," because the cost of technology has dropped significantly in the last fifteen to twenty years.

Initially, the policymaker provides a lot of incentive, and we're still there, with some incentives, to help move the industry along. But we have seen that now the adoption is driven by economics, not just by policymaking or incentives.

There are pure economics that are driving more adoptions. It is about driving adoption regardless of who owns it. But who operates it becomes an important part of that because the utility has to make sure the lights stay on.

With this large variability, it is hard to plan. We have seen related blackouts in different areas, whether in Europe or Texas.

The utility to me is the glue supplying and managing all the energy resources. But then they have to bring in the new technology and recognize the changes in how resources are dispatched, because now generation is not just from top down, or from large generation sources, but everywhere, including from distributed energy at homes and businesses.

Flow is bidirectional or sometimes multidirectional, and how do you manage that? The utility needs to invest in technology to deal with that. The customer's role is changing from consumer to energy producer, so the utility also has to deal with that role change.

DistribuTECH International conversations at fortnightly.com:

• ABB's John Hayter, Nedra Hurley
• Accenture's Patrick Aluise
• AiDash's Abhishek Singh
• AVEVA's Ann Moore
• Bentley Systems' Joe Travis, Brad Johnson
• Bidgely's Gautam Aggarwal, Maria Kretzing
• Capgemini's Hari Krishnamurthy
• FLO's Chris Thorson, Frank Fata, Nathan Yang
• GE's Mahesh Sudhakaran
• Hitachi's Anthony Allard
• IBM's Casey Werth
• OATI's Mary Brown, Ali Ipakchi
• Oracle's Brad Harkavy, Sameer Kalra, Allison Salke, Mary Sprayregen
• PXiSE's Patrick Lee
• Toshiba's Jeff Simmons