At last week’s DistribuTech show in Dallas, GE Digital announced an end-to-end modular distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) to help utilities keep the grid safe, secure and resilient

This is the first product resulting from GE’s acquisition of Opus One. Called Opus One DERMS, it is designed to enable energy affordability and customer participation in power generation and contribution.

The software is designed to provide intelligence, operations, economics and markets in a modular way that can let grid operators connect, see, control and optimise DERs from technical and economic standpoints, while helping utilities provide clean, reliable and affordable energy to their customers.

Today, utilities face growing DER backlogs, lack of visibility into DER behaviour, the inability to control DERs intelligently, and the need to balance market transactions with grid safety. High distributed power generation intermittency, low grid inertia and masked loads result in significant operational risks. And utilities also need to be prudent in their grid investments while meeting growing regulatory compliance as DERs lead to opportunities such as monetising surplus energy in wholesale and local markets.

Opus One DERMS is designed to grow with a utility’s needs use case by use case, feeder by feeder, and substation by substation. It helps utilities optimise the increasing number of DERs while enabling non-wires alternatives and facilitating flexibility and transactive markets for distributed system operators.

This modular software is designed to be vendor agnostic and provides capabilities that support use cases based on a utility’s DER adoption maturity. Utilities can select the modules they need depending on where they are in their DERs’ journey, or how DER-enabled is their advanced distributed management system (ADMS).

Modules can also be integrated with existing ADMS or be separate based on use case requirements. The standards-based architecture is designed to allow flexible deployment.

“The accelerated growth and volume of DERs that are connecting to the grid create both challenges and opportunities for utilities,” said Josh Wong, CEO of Opus One. “With Opus One DERMS, our customers gain a flexible solution for every stage of their modernisation and sustainability journey while delivering affordability with customer engagement and market-based business models.”

Opus One DERMS is designed to accommodate the high growth of DERs, ensure grid reliability and resiliency, and help utilities comply with regulations. It can go beyond basic dispatch and control to forecast, anticipate and resolve system violations while optimising DERs and grid performance across multiple time frames, from minutes to weeks ahead and beyond.

Opus One DERMS can also act as an aggregator of aggregators for utilities by supplying a single pane of glass consolidating visibility and control across fleets of DERs for streamlined DER and grid management. It enables a fine granular view when addressing a violation on a single distribution feeder or an aggregated view when dealing with a violation on a primary substation.

“GE Digital has built a foundation of utility and clean energy expertise to address operational needs in both the renewables and DER integration space,” said John Villali, research director at IDC Energy Insights. “We have been impressed with GE Digital’s level of software innovation and in partnering with the most progressive utility customers globally to meet their DER orchestration and grid optimisation challenges. With the company’s recent investment in Opus One and future product roadmap plans, we see great alignment with the future market need.”