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NETWORK / 27 / OCTOBER 2017 REACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES E nergy technology company Reactive Technologies has announced that it has achieved what it says is a first – measuring grid stability, or inertia, continuously, in real time, in tandem with National Grid. The company, which provides demand side response opportunities to business via cloud-based technology and assists networks and the grid in providing a reli- able and safe service, told Network of the breakthrough in September. Reactive Technologies is a British com- pany, but has a large R&D and development centre in northern Finland, where many of the engineers have experience of working for Nokia. This provides the firm with con- siderable telecommunications expertise. Marc Borrett, Reactive Technologies chief executive, explains: "We have a lot of people who have spent their lives dealing with the challenges of mobile communica- tions networks in managing lots of devices, such as mobile phones, in real time, while maintaining quality of calls and security. "Really, our view is that a lot of the challenges in the energy industry have a communications engineering solution." Renewable energy coming on stream makes the grid more volatile, and on the other side, in terms of demand, there is now much more information about how devices used by consumers are operating, with the potential for fine levels of control. This makes it possible to manage and use some of the volatility of power generated by renewable energy, Borrett says. "We are focused on large scale, at-the- edge communication, monitoring and analysis of the energy network. We recog- nise that the traditional linear structure of the grid is going to have to change, and will have more intelligence at its edges." Late last year, Reactive Technologies made an announcement with National Grid that it had been able to send data through the UK grid on a national scale. This fol- lowed months of work with National Grid in which Reactive was able to successfully embed data in the 50Hz carrier frequency of the entire grid. "We were able to send data through all of the transformers and cover 100% of the UK grid," Borrett explains, effectively "using the grid as a communi- cations channel". Doing this work meant gaining an in-depth understanding of how the grid is operating, observing different phenomena in its operation. This led to a project in which Reactive was able to meas- ure grid inertia in real time, Borrett says. In previous years, when there was not as much renewable energy on the system, and large scale industrial generation dominated, the grid was very stable. If a power station went down, the 50Hz heartbeat of the grid would stop for a second but the electricity system had so much inertia it could "ride through that sudden interruption", explains Borrett. As you lose inertia, stability begins to reduce, and the result is a more volatile grid. Coal-fired power stations are being decommissioned, replaced with solar farm inverters, for example, that don't have rotational kinetic energy. Offshore wind farms do create some inertia thanks to the rotational movement of turbine blades, but "over time inertia has been steadily reduc- ing on the energy system". That means if a power station goes down, it has a significant effect on the speed at which the frequency changes. The faster the speed of the change, the more challenging it is for the network operator to do something about it. Understanding the level of inertia that is on the grid becomes increasingly important to the grid operator Analysing grid inertia Reactive Technologies claims it has successfully measured grid inertia in real time, for the first time.