Industrial Automation Magazine India

Automation plays a big role in making carbon intensity of portfolios visible

Published on : Saturday 04-02-2023

Saurabh Kumar, Head, GEAPP India

Green Energy is a buzzword today. How can automation and control help to scale up the Green Energy solutions to industrial levels?
Automation and control can play a significant part in decarbonisation of industries with very unique and innovative business models. One of the emerging business models is the Energy as a service (EaaS) wherein a service provider offers customer access to energy and management services without any associated upfront costs through a contract. The customer pays only for ongoing services and avoids infrastructure and equipment charges, much like software as a service model. These services are specifically tailored to the customer’s goals, whether it is to reduce energy usage, be more sustainable or improve their bottom line. Engaging in EaaS helps to practice sustainability, while reducing the burden of capital and performance on the client. Contrary to today’s narrative of asset-focused centralised power generation and sale to customers who passively consume, EaaS manages energy assets and services end to end. This enables the industry to have expertise in energy management and energy efficiency and at the same time access to renewable energy as a service without having to invest in the infrastructure.
 
Power and Energy are frequently used (incorrectly) as interchangeable, but they are different terms. Power is the instantaneous quantity of energy. Many applications use energy out of a storage system, most common being batteries. The process of capturing energy in a battery at a time of surplus and using the energy at a time of need is an old concept, both in stationary applications and also in mobile vehicles. The hitch is that, both the storage and withdrawal have many losses involved. What are recent advances which drastically reduce such losses?
Energy is a much broader term than Power, which is one form of energy. Power has to be used when generated – its time use depends on the storage available. While there are losses in storing power and withdrawing it later, the new age batteries Lithium Ion and other Advanced Cell Chemistry are reducing this to a bare minimum. Unlike the Lead Acid Batteries where the losses are high, the new chemistries are much more efficient. However, the current issue is not so much about the losses but the economic cost of storage. At current cost of Lithium Ion batteries, the storage cost per unit is anywhere between Rs 7-8 which makes the actual energy that is stored to be between Rs10-12 per unit and therefore not commercially viable.
 
Generation of electricity from fossil fuels is attributed with generation of over 40% of CO2 emissions.  Automation can play a big role firstly in creating the dashboards and also helping with algorithms to reduce these emissions. What are the trends in this matter which is occupying the mind space of leaders the world over?
Automation plays a big role in making carbon intensity of portfolios visible (by way of a dashboard) and thereby to create a baseline carbon footprint against which to measure improvements over time. The trends on this in the industrial space are converging towards looking at pathways to decarbonise. Most large industrial conglomerates in the World (BP, Shell, Exxon, IBM, etc.), have already publicly declared their respective target dates for decarbonisation and are taking steps of meeting these goals by internal improvements and also buying carbon offsets. Many India corporates too have set their goals for decarbonisation like RIL, Tata, etc. It may not be out of place to mention that India Railways has announced their decarbonisation plan by 2030. The key ingredients of this pathway are:
•         Investing in energy efficiency;
•         Sourcing more power from RE;
•         Fuels shift from fossil fuels to Hydrogen; and
•         Carbon offsets.
 
Traditionally power transmission meant transporting energy generated from large utilities to consumption centres located well away. But today, with various alternate means of generation, who also have an ambition to export energy to the grid, the patterns have changed. There are multiple points of generation of various capacities with different constraints, which might impact grid stability. What steps are taken to induct the new technologies of AI and ML into this challenging area?
As the decentralised generation of energy is becoming more popular, the power sector is getting ‘democratised’ as their power plants are close to load centres (like Roof Top, etc.), and do not need long transmission lines. However, the fact that renewable energy remains something that is infirm, there are interventions using technologies that are needed to make effective use of them. Depending on the particular market environment, a technology (AI/ML) based platform, also called the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) can accomplish a whole range of tasks with the objective to network distributed energy resources such as wind farms, solar parks, and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units, in order to monitor, forecast, optimize and trade their power. This way, fluctuations in the generation of renewables can be balanced by ramping up and down power generation and power consumption of controllable units. But the VPP not only helps stabilise the power grids. It also creates the preconditions for integrating renewable energies into the markets. Individual small plants can in general not provide balancing services or offer their flexibility on the power exchanges. This is because their generation profile varies too strongly or they simply do not meet the minimum bid size of the markets. By aggregating the power of several units, a VPP can deliver the same service and redundancy and subsequently trade on the same markets as large central power plants or industrial consumers.
 
One of the major challenges in power distribution is disruption to power supply due to faults in the distribution system. This forces many entities to resort to captive power generation systems, which are of a smaller capacity, and then usually of lower efficiency. One attempt all along has been to localise and repair faults rapidly. What new technologies have entered this field?
The advent of cheap renewable energy has increased its importance for industries not just from a sustainability perspective but from an economic one as well. The government has also encouraged open access of renewable energy from levels of 100 kW. Therefore, many industries are looking at options of VPP, open access RE to supplement their energy requirements with the aim to perhaps get rid of their inefficient captive power using coal/diesel, etc. The technologies are all the same but the regulatory changes and lower cost of energy from RE is making them attractive. Future clean energy candidates are Batteries, Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, etc.
 
In a smart city, metering of electricity consumed needs smart meters. These meters need to do more than just measure the flow of power; they may also need to track time-of-day consumption, maximum demand and such parameters. What are the latest techniques in this field?
Smart meters have emerged as the strongest reform measure that has been taken in the Distribution sector. Under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), the Government has announced that all 28 crore consumers will be switched over to smart meters. The benefits of the switch will be:
•         Transparency to consumers of usage of energy – management of energy consumption and enhancing its efficiency;
•         Reduction in losses for utilities as the billing does not need any manual intervention and is fully automated. In case of non-payment, Utility could switch off the consumers remotely;
•         Overall load management and efficiencies at DISCOM level and higher integration of renewables; and
•         Better quality power supply.
 
Using new techniques, like AI/ ML, better demand and supply forecasting and scheduling could lead to better quality of power supply and higher consumer satisfaction.
    
(The views expressed in interviews are personal, not necessarily of the organisations represented)

Saurabh Kumar has recently joined GEAPP and will be the India CEO once the legal entity is established. Prior to that he was the Executive Vice Chairperson and Managing Director of Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), a joint venture of public-sector undertakings under the Ministry of Power, Government of India. EESL has implemented the globally-lauded UJALA programme and Street Light National Programme (SLNP), E-Mobility, smart meters, trigeneration and decentralised solar power plants. Prior to joining EESL, he worked in Ministries of Finances and Power, Bureau of Energy Efficiency and UN Environment Program. He has worked on energy efficiency policies and programmes. In his stint with EESL, he led the growth of the company from less than $1 m turnover in 2013 to over $400 m in 2021 with operations in the UK, UAE, and South Asia. He has worked for over 30 years in Ministries of Finance and Power and also with the UN.
 
He also worked as an Independent Consultant working with World Bank, GIZ, USAID, etc., in the field of Clean Energy in India, South Asia and Africa.
 
Mr Kumar is an Electrical Engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and Masters in Public Policy from National Graduate Institute of Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan.