Synergi Electric helps drive optimal investment decisions at Eversource

Eversource Energy transmits and delivers electricity and natural gas and supplies water to approximately 4.6 million customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

Over the last several decades, the company grew from several smaller utility companies in the region to become New England’s largest energy provider, which makes its forecasting and modeling challenges unique. DNV’s Synergi Electric software has been helping the company enhance its processes in order to improve safety, reliability, and affordability for customers. 

“Without sophisticated modeling capabilities including forecasting, optimal investment decisions would not be possible,” said Steffen Ziegler, Lead Engineer at Eversource’s Advanced Forecasting and Modeling Team. 

“The sophistication of the scenarios we can look at now, versus the prior rudimentary case of percentage of load growth over time, is very different,” said Senior Engineer John Kreso. “Now we’re probabilistically looking at things. We’re looking at hundreds of thousands more of those sophisticated scenarios in a short period of time.”

From simpler to more complex forecasts

Along with addressing the challenges of Eversource’s many different legacy data systems, the company is using advanced distribution grid modeling to help address the exponentially growing complexity of the power grid as the electric system is upgraded at such a rapid pace. 

“Safety, reliability and affordability are our main goals at Eversource, and with the unprecedented amount of investment into the grid, optimal investment into the infrastructure is paramount,” said Ziegler.

“Before, we would look at factors like population growth in different towns and cities, which was predictable or somewhat known, and you could translate that into predicted load,” said Kreso. “Now with so much happening, with solar power, batteries, electric vehicles, and the randomness of how that’s evolving over time requires these more sophisticated tools to be able to process that and to build scenarios for consideration,” he says

These advanced modeling capabilities will enable us to take on the challenge of a dynamic, DER-integrated world.

  • Steffen Ziegler
  • Lead Engineer, Advanced Forecasting and Modeling Team
  • Eversource

DNV and Synergi Electric’s software is helping the energy company overcome data gaps and present information in a more meaningful, accessible way. With expertise in both software and power grids, DNV’s Synergi Electric team attended several workshops to better understand Eversource’s various data structures. 

“It was incredibly challenging to build all the different rule sets to make the data in the model to look the same to the user, so it’s really helpful to have a system that can translate all that information into a unified grid model,” said Kreso. 

Integration and data harmonization

As Eversource works every day to accelerate the clean energy transition in New England, the company remains focused on strategies and solutions that will ensure it is affordable and attainable for all customers. Probabilistic modeling and reliability studies contribute on a daily basis to customer satisfaction, and with the kind of integration and data
harmonization provided by progressive software solutions like those offered by DNV, it can also help utilities comply with regulatory requirements and provide more accurate information to those agencies. 

“Being able to put an analysis on top of regulatory demands means that it goes full cycle. We provide data back to the regulators, and we have confidence in it. This builds trust between the regulators and the utilities,” said Ziegler. “These advanced modeling capabilities will enable us to take on the challenge of a dynamic, DER-integrated world.”

electric grid pylon

About Eversource Energy

Eversource Energy is New England’s largest energy distribution company, serving 4.6 million customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire with electric, gas and water services. Operations have evolved to encompass a wide range of energy services, including transmission, distribution and retail supply. Eversource prioritizes safety, reliability, environmental stewardship and expanding energy options for customers, while also focusing on energy efficiency and conservation.

Profile

  • Customer name: Eversource Energy
  • Web address: eversource.com
  • Market: Electric distribution and transmission
  • Employees: 10,000+
  • Product: Synergi Electric

Brief account

This is why we chose Synergi Electric:

  • Sophisticated modeling capabilities, including forecasting
  • DNV has a very good support system and listens to customers
  • Eversource’s unique data needs, bringing together numerous systems

This is what we gained:

  •  Synergi Electric plays vital role in many areas: e.g. reliability modeling, hosting capacity calculation, contingency analysis, multi-substation modeling, probabilistic load flow analysis
  • Continuous improvement of the underlying data
  • Integration of Synergi Electric with other applications
  • Excellent support and technical issue resolution from DNV 

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Synergi Electric

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