Foundational repositories like the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World and the NOAA’s World Weather Records serve as libraries rich with the critical data used to analyze trends and forecast possible futures by multiple industries across the world. As we head into electricity’s expansive golden age, our knowledge base requires a similar specialized collection: intelligence and fine detail on global power systems. A team at GE Vernova’s Consulting Services has spent years building and maintaining just such a large collection, one that spans from Japan to the U.K., Vietnam to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). When helping a country form a master energy plan, or when assisting energy developers in planning out a reliable energy mix, these power system experts call upon this library as a starting point for their analysis.
Gene Hinkle, executive of Power Economics and Software for GE Vernova Consulting Services, ascribes some of the company’s edge to its longtime presence around the world. “One of the advantages we have is that we have people in each of these regions, each of these countries, providing local intelligence to build these models.”
Of course, that’s just the beginning of the consulting journey. Hinkle explains that when his team conducts a study, countries and regions often have ambitious goals already in place. It might go something like this: By 2040 we need to not only grow the current system, but have renewables driving at least half of the power grid. Consulting Services is then able to do a side-by-side comparison of that plan against their own baseline model. The difference between the two is then narrowed as the power experts apply further rounds of analytics to find the best path — often a combination of reasonable cost and solid reliability — to the ultimate goal.
“Understanding the overall existing system and the rules in place is important, and then we build that into our own modeling, simulate it, and see what the outcome looks like,” says Hinkle.
High-Fidelity Models Feed Confident Planning
To wrangle the massive amounts of data that undergird these planning models is a true team effort. Working with Hinkle are some 25 other analysts around the world with backgrounds in electric power engineering, economics, and finance. Some have worked for the utilities, system operators, and developers in local markets and bring on-the-ground experience, while others have backgrounds that give them a more global perspective.
The global models serve as the bedrock for the team’s powerful software, which helps them assess energy systems and identify best paths forward while aligning with, and sometimes conflicting, goals. The heart of Consulting Services’ predictive work comes through something called integrated systems planning (ISP). Imagine a powerful software architecture that explores thousands of potential solutions and then helpfully displays a select group of the very best answers. How might this actually work? Take the UAE, for example, a country rich not only in gas and oil but in sunshine, and thus great solar potential, and a country that is growing fast economically and also has ambitious decarbonization goals. What to do? “For the UAE, we run an expansion planning module,” says Hinkle. “That analysis will look at the cost of each technology across many different scenarios. Once the model has simulated a wide range of outcomes, we can start to select the best overall mix of generation and storage configurations, at the most favorable cost.”
But cost is only one axis along which the various simulations can run. According to Hinkle, “We can run the data through the production cost module to take a closer look at the economics and how to reduce the overall production cost to the system. Then we can run it through the resource adequacy module to see how reliable the system is. We can even run it through a physics model to look at the flow of power under different constraints and conditions.”
Hinkle says it’s useful to run all of these analyses on all potential plans. For example, you may find that the least-cost solution doesn’t give you the reliability you need. When you use all these tools and filters together, you take a more integrated approach to system planning: guiding a system to strike the best balance between capital and production cost, reliability, and emissions goals.
Working from a Strong Foundation
Looking ahead, the team will continue to diligently maintain the existing models. At the moment, this group maintains about 55 models throughout the world, and these are refreshed often with updated data. “We started building these originally for our internal use. But now it serves as an invaluable foundation that has multiple benefits — from underpinning our software products to strengthening our ability to advise the industry,” says Hinkle.
As a new golden age of electricity gets underway, the team intends to support the industry by building more models, expanding to a new group of countries yet to be studied. Last year’s acceleration of power demand growth — which advanced by a robust 4.3%, double the trailing ten-year average — is a signal to the industry that generation and transmission capacity must expand. The effective pursuit of the energy transition does not rely on equipment alone, and the engineering required to modernize global power grids is crucial. Deep knowledge and comprehensive analysis play an even more critical role today, enabling whole nations to successfully transform their aspirations into reality.