AES Ohio proposes next phase of smart grid advancement

AES Ohio is proposing to invest $682.7 million in its Smart Grid Phase 2 plan over the ten-year period starting July 2025.

With the phase 2 plan, AES Ohio is proposing to continue the modernisation of its grid, which has been underway in the first phase, with a focus on the ongoing rollout of smart technologies to improve system stability and performance and the backbone communication capabilities.

At the foundation of the smart grid is smart meters and AES Ohio expects to have deployed these to 95% of customers by June 2025.

The smart grid phase 2 plan has three principal components – automation of distribution operations, advanced grid intelligence and telecommunications and cybersecurity.

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“We have a commitment to our customers and community to ensure the reliability and resiliency of our grid by making needed modernisation investments,” says Ken Zagzebski, President and CEO of AES Utilities.

“With the successful deployment of smart meters and mid-line reclosers in phase 1, customers are benefitting from fewer outages and decreased restoration times. The Smart Grid 2 plan is a critical step to an integrated grid and creating meaningful capability improvements that add value to our customers.”

The plan filings point to a number of challenges and opportunities that have driven the phase 2 vision.

These include fundamental changes in the energy industry that have created unprecedented strain on the nation’s power grid such as the rise of decarbonisation, the installation of utility-scale storage and renewables projects and the rapid adoption of customer-owned distributed resources.

In addition localised changes including more volatile weather, increasing adoption of EVs and growth from new industrial, commercial and residential customers have further increased the need for grid modernisation.

To achieve improved operational insights, AES Ohio is proposing investments in areas including dynamic network model optimisation, distributed energy resource management, the distribution performance monitoring and analytics centre and grid edge intelligence.

Regarding grid technology deployment, AES plans to continue to make investments in a self-healing grid, with a particular focus on grid automation, volt/var optimisation/conservation voltage reduction, an advanced distribution management system and field crew management.

To support the connectivity needs of the new technologies, such as the new substation and distribution devices, upgrades and expansion of the existing communication networks also are proposed, along with a strengthening of cybersecurity measures and optimising advanced threat readiness.

Positive benefits

In the filing, AES Ohio estimates a 3.6 to 1 NPV benefits-to-cost ratio of the investments over 20 years, with most indirect in the form of reduced CO2 emissions and economic impact but almost a third direct, including avoided or deferred capital spend, operations and maintenance and energy and demand savings and enhanced reliability.

AES Ohio has requested an order on the plan in Q1 of 2025 to enable smooth transition between the two phases but also in the anticipation of maintaining on-site the same contractors working on the phase 1 investments.

AES Ohio serves more than 527,000 customer accounts in west central Ohio.