Utilities around the world can do more to guarantee energy supply to customers through current crisis

We urge European energy suppliers and governments to be smarter in the use of existing technologies to allay or reduce threats posed by hostile interventions in electricity supply.

Fears of power outages in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the rest of Europe, have become a reality, due of course to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Contingency measures and steps are already being introduced to counteract this, such as Germany progressing its three-stage emergency gas plan, with rationing of heated water and swimming pool closures also in place.

However, preventative and contingency measures could have been introduced sooner to reduce the impact on consumers and industry worldwide, but more importantly, technology already available to many grid companies could be deployed more widely in order to predict and manage available supplies in a more sophisticated and timely manner.

Whilst there’s no escaping legitimate energy-security concerns resultant from the situation in Ukraine, solutions do exist that can help improve and smooth the distribution of power across national and regional grids. The principal responsibility of utility companies is to meet the energy demand of customers with the highest degree of security and at the best prices possible in all time horizons. Whilst we can't change our power infrastructure rapidly due to the sheer size of the power system, we can deploy systems that model scenarios to help maintain equilibrium and reduce outage.

Power supply, even in times of relative geopolitical stability, is inherently vulnerable, being exposed to myriad destabilising factors, such as changing weather conditions, spot maintenance, change in demand and fluctuating reserves. And from a humanitarian perspective, we saw last year the consequence that loss of energy security can have on people and communities when weather in Texas caused havoc. Hostile interventions add a new dimension and that’s where technology can and should play its full part. We designed the Promaps systems, now being operated across a number of grid customers in Scandinavia and elsewhere in the world, to give them the system insights they need to make the right decisions, both for the short term and to prepare for the future.

*Arne is the founder of Promaps Technology, and one of the creators of the pioneering Promaps Realtime platform, which was acquired by Vysus Group in February 2021.

Promaps Realtime can offer real-time probabilistic risk analysis of power supply security through its unique analytic tool, using big data to analyse the security of the power supply in real time by using a digital twin of the power system to help calculate anticipated disturbances across the grid infrastructure, including the identification of risk of losing the energy supply to the customers in the power system. This empowers national and commercial grids to take proactive steps in times of volatility and rapidly changing circumstances.

Further information about Vysus Group and the Promaps software can be found here.