Close up view of a car’s headlights while plugged into an electric vehicle charging point.

Coping with renewable generation 

The decarbonization of the energy system and the high penetration of DERs quickly transform the landscape of distribution grids. Utilities are now confronting the most transformational period of change. The pervasive adoption of DERs is driving the need to re-evaluate how they manage their network infrastructure. Our CGI OpenGrid DERMS solution helps you address these changes, allowing your business to: 

  • Enable static and dynamic aggregation of disparate DERs
  • Develop, optimize and dispatch coordinated schedules to meet forecast demand
  • Encourage the development of new business models and revenue streams
  • Support the complete customer engagement, settlement, and billing life cycle.
     

Addressing the impact of DERs 

While diverse resources with different characteristics, constraints, and technologies are actively connecting to the grid, the direction of power flow is changing. It will introduce new challenges to network protection, forecasting, planning, power resiliency and more. CGI OpenGrid DERMS is designed to specifically address these challenges and set your organization up for success by providing the following: 

Control and visibility over assets operating on the grid
  • Leverage complete visibility of the grid, including utility- and independently-owned DERs
  • Optimize DER usage to improve network reliability and performance
Simplify systems monitoring, aggregation and control
  • Standardize integration and communication protocols
  • Improve network reliability and performance
Optimize DER usage to improve network reliability
  • Leverage near-real-time information of DERs to ensure system reliability while maintaining customer comfort
  • Support the complete customer engagement, settlement and billing life cycle

 

Central Energy Markets

Accelerating holistic orchestration and transactive energy  

To accommodate the growing expectations of prosumers participating in the energy ecosystem, CGI OpenGrid DERMS is built on a network model to help utilities orchestrate and regulate their DERs for enhanced reliability, network efficiency, and grid performance.  

CGI DERMS graphic

Connect 

Independently-owned DERs are registered, validated, and connected with the existing network assets to provide a holistic view of power production and consumption across the service territory. 

Monitor 

Performance of connected DERs is monitored and key data such as power, Volt-Var, and voltage are visualized and aggregated by the transformer and feeder. 

Dispatch 

Dispatch of constraints and commands can be performed manually, scheduled based on date and time, automatically triggered based on events, or imported from external systems. 

Schedule 

Priority scheduling of dispatches based on various allocation profiles that include fault proximity, connection agreement, financial goals to command control equitably, and curtailment dispatches across the available DERs. 

Optimize 

Network optimization allows utilities to improve forecasting of power demand and manage resource capacity to meet that demand. By equipping network operations with additional insight, utilities gain accurate visibility and control of devices operating on the grid edge while simultaneously meeting demand and minimizing reserves traditionally needed to meet in-day fluctuations.