Context
Energy policy questions, particularly those related to the evolution of electricity distribution networks, are of general interest. They touch upon national sovereignty, energy transition, and the country’s industrial competitiveness. Therefore, they must be the subject of thorough public debate to ensure all contributions are considered and to secure the democratic legitimacy of decisions made. However, until recently, stakeholders such as university researchers, private research and innovation actors, associations, or even public authorities generally had very little precise and easily usable information regarding the electrical network. This situation is fortunately evolving positively in several countries, including France, where data concerning network infrastructure is progressively being made publicly available.
Problem Statement
The public data available in France doesn’t strictly constitute a complete electrical model of the distribution network, but rather a simple cartographic description. This requires massive computational processing to obtain an electrical model useful for open engineering work. This data is also incomplete: much essential information is missing, such as conductor materials and sections, as well as the rated power of transformers. Consequently, certain indispensable information must be inferred from complementary knowledge. Finally, the data is dispersed across several different sources and presents various quality issues: inconsistencies, missing or outlier values. Therefore, meticulous preliminary work is necessary to consolidate, control, then correct or filter the public data that will be used to build the electrical model. Given the large volume of network data to process, this work must also be highly automated.
Achievements
- Identification, analysis, and consolidation of available Open Data: ODRE, ORE Agency, etc.
- Development of a method for estimating missing technical characteristics of equipment (conductors, transformers).
- Development of a method for estimating the load of MV/LV substations.
- Development of a network topology reconstruction method.
- Data processing: correction, association with objects from equipment catalogs, etc.
- Generation of the electrical model of the Metropolitan France distribution network.
Impact
The electrical model thus created has already been utilized by numerous stakeholders, such as the PERSEE (Procédés, Energies Renouvelables et Systèmes Energétiques) laboratory of Mines ParisTech, which used it for a study on the technico-economic valorization of decentralized production flexibility at the French national level and for the 2050 horizon.
