The Problem

Distribution Network Operators (DNO) are facing technical and commercial challenges as the electricity industry moves rapidly towards new generation solutions and customer usage patterns. These new developments are placing stress, not only on the high voltage supply lines, but also, importantly, on the low voltage local networks as heat pumps, EV usage and distributed generation (mostly PV) become more widespread. As voltage fluctuations increase, the need for accurate grid performance forecasting is becoming critical.

The absence of real, measured data is a problem.

 The Steelhouse solution

Steelhouse has developed a solution that brings together domain-specific, high granularity, data gathering capability and neural network time series technology to provide an innovative solution to forecasting within low voltage networks. 

Data-driven neural network and deep learning time series technology solutions can capture complex temporal patterns and nonlinear relationships over long periods of time and better adapt to a continually changing environment. They are better suited to daily and intra-day real time forecasting requirements, however, the absence of current domain-specific data can be an issue, both at the training from scratch and inference/fine tuning stages.

Accordingly, for the past three years and as part of a carefully controlled development program, Steelhouse has been recording real time voltage and frequency (and other related power variables) on low voltage networks at multiple sensor locations in Germany, Spain and the UK. The Steelhouse database stands at around 200 million data points in total and is growing.

Using this database, Steelhouse has developed a series of neural network time series forecasting models that can provide voltage or frequency forecasts on the low voltage grid over both short and medium time horizons.

Steelhouse recognises the need to ensure that our solutions are both energy efficient and data secure. Accordingly our models have been optimised to run securely and locally on Steelhouse servers in Europe, rather than on remote, energy intensive, hyperscaler cloud data centres.