New IEC White Paper on benefits of digital twins for energy sector

Deploying renewables for electricity generation is essential to meeting the world's climate action targets. By 2030, renewable power is expected to surpass 10 terawatts globally, nearly quadrupling the current capacity.

This projection also brings the current limitations of the existing infrastructure into sharp focus. In coming decades grid networks need to be more robust and flexible. Modernizing the current infrastructure and expanding the transmission systems are therefore on government priority lists to enable their clean energy transition efforts.

Digital twin technologies could prove to be the key to accelerating the quest for more resilient, efficient, and sustainable power systems.

What benefits can digital twins bring to the energy sector?

Digital twins in the energy sector are digital - and often real time - representations of the physical grid assets.

Effective use of digital twin technologies can help grid planners and grid operators manage their systems efficiently, helping them overcome infrastructural challenges of dealing with load growth, variability of renewable energy, and extreme weather.

Digital twins help utility companies improve planning and specifications, operational efficiency and personnel training. They offer a way to stress-test important assets and systems in preparation for a wide range of scenarios, including severe weather episodes.

They can also help industry meet net-zero goals and adapt to climate change by helping planners monitor and identify design alternatives to reduce carbon emissions.

The technology will be even more important as we grow into a more connected society, with different sectors having to work closely with each other to leverage synergies. For example, the electricity sector will need to work closely with the emerging green hydrogen sector and with other energy related systems such as the electric vehicle network. Digital twins can help the effective realization of such complex systems, by ensuring efficient data exchange, and identifying gaps and synergies.

New IEC White Paper analyses the potential opportunities

The new IEC White Paper on Virtualizing power systems: how digital twins will revolutionize the energy sector focuses on the benefits digital twins can bring. Addressing challenges in such an implementation, the paper recommends among other solutions, the adoption of core standards for describing underlying data models, and to create secure open data exchange policies.

The paper provides recommendations for tangible actions that government agencies, standards bodies, and digital twin stakeholders can take to unlock the potential of digital twin technologies and their revolutionary impact on the energy sector of the future.

The white paper has been prepared by a project team representing a variety of organizations, working under the IEC Market Strategy Board (MSB) and can be found here.

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