Case of success | Smart Grids solutions for utility in Germany

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This success story is based on a real distribution company in Germany, with almost 700,000 km of electricity grid. Germany is one of the most advanced countries in Europe in terms of renewable energy deployment. 95 % of all renewable energy plants in Germany are connected to the distribution grid. This utility has connected around 900,000 renewable energy plants to the distribution grids.

An annual increase in renewable energies of up to 12.4 gigawatts is expected by 2030, which corresponds to the output of about 1.2 million new rooftop solar systems. More than half of these plants will be connected to this utilitie distribution grids.

Millions of electric vehicles connected to its grid over the next few years

On the other hand, there are now over 600,000 electric-powered vehicles on German roads. Including hybrids, they are over a million. The share of purely electric cars in new car sales in 2022 so far is around 14 percent. Thus, there will be millions of electric vehicles connected to its grid over the next few years.
All this means the LV distribution grids in Germany are some of the most affected ones by a massive deployment of small renewable plants, heat pumps, electric vehicles and charging stations.

The callenge of a bidirectional Low Voltage Network

Arrival of all these new elements makes the LV distribution grid a bidirectional one, with important variations in voltage levels and increase of disturbances in energy signal quality. This dynamic scenario requires the use of new tools to control and monitor LV distribution grid. That’s why Germany’s electrical utilities are leaders in regulated distribution transformers and LV supervision is beginning to deploy massively.

The Low Voltage Supervision Solution

Because of all this, the utility decided to push the LV supervision per feeder in distribution panels in order to get detailed information of their LV infrastructure. Pronutec, as their traditional provider, was invited to participate in this process in 2020. By then, our LV supervision solution, developed in collaboration with our brother company Merytronic, had been supplied to several countries before, adapted to different LV infrastructures. This experience was very useful for its project. We finally got the homologation as LV advanced supervisor provider at Germany in early 2022.

The compactness, reduced cabling, safety, available protocols and robustness of our solution were key to succeed. We are part of a multivendor system, complying with all Hardware and Software interoperability requirements. Since then, we’ve got to satisfy an important share of the utility needs, having supplied more than 5.000 LV lines equipped with supervisors, which are installed in their LV panels of different types of secondary substations

For more information about or Smart Grids solutions and their application, visit our Smart Grids website.

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