We are excited to welcome Robert Bridges of CenterPoint Energy to our September Chapter Meeting to share more information on Future Improved Grid Hardening through the use of the Digital Twin.

Presentation Abstract:
With extreme weather events becoming more common and more impactful to utility grids and the utility industry, there has been added outages and durations. A shift to a honed focus on resiliency and grid hardening is needed to mitigate these disruptions and better serve our customers. CenterPoint Energy, located in Houston, TX, has begun to embark on a path of leveraging historical data to aid to develop improved grid hardening measures by leveraging a software tool necessary to a sustainable improvement. This new software, known in the industry as the “Digital Twin”, simply stated is a digital model of the T&D system that can be leveraged to simulate extreme weather conditions. This tool offers the promise of analyzing and visualizing data through the incorporation of a combination of LiDAR, GIS, weather, outage, and other datasets, to show impacts to the current contingent of equipment in the field, allowing immediate concerns found to be mitigated, modeling potential impacts of extreme weather conditions on the current contingent, mitigating those concerns through analysis of proposed improvements. These improvements become cyclical, continually optimizing for maximum customer benefit, and can be replicated throughout similar feeders for greater resiliency and aiding in speeding up design times. Other benefits include reporting and machine to machine communication for developing work orders, etc. can be achieved. Overall, the early results have provided a glimpse of the future in resiliency.

Speaker Bio:
Robert Bridges is the Manager of DER Engineering and Analytics and has been in the Utility industry for over 11 years. His current responsibilities include the studies of DER’s interconnecting to the distribution grid and managing the software platform that models the entire distribution grid within the CEHE territory. He was previously the Manager of Long-Range Strategy and had responsibilities for the new Digital Twin Platform, Digital Substations, Microgrids, and Sensors within CenterPoint Energy located in Houston, Texas. Prior to this, he was Manager of Distributed Generation and orchestrated the receipt and physical interconnection of thousands of distributed energy resources monthly within the CenterPoint Energy territory, incorporating technologies to seamlessly add generation to the grid.  Before moving to the Distributed Generation Team in 2016, he worked in the Distribution System Protection and Standards and Materials Teams, working with equipment related to Intelligent Grid Sectionalizing Devices (IGSD’s) and recloser and substation relaying, providing support for deployment of devices and troubleshooting failures of devices. Prior to his work within CenterPoint, he worked in the communications industry. He is also a Professional Engineer registered in the State of Texas.

A special thank you to Siemens for being our September Table Top Sponsor!