TALKING POINT
Covid chaos: The good, the bad and the different Anja Langer Jacquin, CCO at DEPsys, examines what Covid-19 could mean for DSOs in the long-term. ummer has been and gone, but Covid-19 is still with us. Though parts of society are reopening, full normality will be a slow, potentially irregular process – three steps forward, two steps back. Nonetheless, the situation has improved enough that we can start to think about the future. A shock as profound as the pandemic will spark lasting changes: some good, some bad, some simply different. Distribution system operators (DSOs) and distribution network operators (DNOs) will not be exempt from this. These utilities have had to rapidly pivot to handle the immediate challenges of the crisis, and now are in the midst of managing low- and medium-voltage grids through the transitionary phase as societies reopen. Now they must ask themselves what is at the other end of that transitionary phase. It can’t be a simple return to life before – Covid-19 has changed the game and besides, the industry’s commitment to the energy transition means there can be no backwards movement. So, what will those changes be? What are the lessons Covid-19 has
S
42 Electrical Review | October 2020
taught us? Above all, that grid digitalisation – what many call the smart grid – may already have been a long-time industry talking point, but in reality, it is more important and urgent than we ever thought. A different day-to-day Many have speculated that Covid-19 will have lasting effects on how work is structured in our lives, with swathes of employees worldwide having adapted to working from home. One piece of research suggests that as many as 80% of German workplaces now have a flexible working policy in place – the most of any country worldwide. Four other European nations make the global top ten. For grid managers, there is no substitute for a certain amount of field work. However, many functions such as grid monitoring, optimisation and power quality analysis are computer-based and therefore could easily be done remotely. At least, they could be if grid assets were sufficiently digitised to feed back real-time information to such systems remotely. Those DSOs which did have such digitalisation in place were ready
