Utilities across North America have formed the Total Grid Orchestration (TGO) Alliance to address challenges like aging infrastructure, rapid supply and demand shift, and complex technology transformations.
Founding members of the TGO Alliance include Black & Veatch, CPS Energy, Essex Power, Hydro Ottawa Limited, Landis+Gyr, Public Service of New Mexico, PUC Services, Rappahannock, Uplight and Think Labs.
The alliance has been established as a collaborative forum to develop an industrywide framework for grid orchestration across planning, engineering and operation. It will work on approaches to system wide coordination, situational awareness and risk management across the entire grid, enabling alignment and integration between near-term operational decisions and long-term planning.
“TGO is a timely effort to bridge traditional boundaries of generation, transmission and distribution in the power sector to ensure we reduce system inefficiencies as we work to support and deliver the energy transition,” said Guillaume Paradis, chief operating officer of Hydro Ottawa Limited and co-chair of the TGO Alliance. “Although market mechanisms will be important to support and respond to the broad growth in energy demand, we must also ensure energy decision making is done in consideration of all potential value-creating options and avoid optimizing at the local level and delivering sub-optimal results for customers.”
The alliance attempts to inform and improve integrated planning and operational capabilities across generation, transmission, distribution and behind-the-meter assets to maximize distributed and variable energy supply and demand optimization.
“Our goal in forming this alliance with power utilities and technology solution providers is to optimize the electric grid to deliver better outcomes through a balanced and scalable approach,” said Joe Zhou, vice president and senior managing director for Black & Veatch, and co-chair of the TGO Alliance. “This alliance has been formed to optimize grid lifecycle management and bridge the gap between planning and operations to support the energy transition and ensure a reliable and sustainable grid.”
