Case Study: State Grid Corporation of China achieves faster-than-real-time Energy Management System with TigerGraph

State Grid Corporation Of China, Delivering a Faster Than Real-Time Energy Management System

State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), via its research arm GEIRINorth America, faced the long-standing industry challenge of building a faster-than-real-time Energy Management System (EMS) able to complete state estimation, power flow and contingency analysis within a SCADA sample cycle (typically 5 seconds). To tackle this, GEIRINA partnered with TigerGraph and used TigerGraph’s graph database and graph computing platform to rethink power-system modeling and computation.

TigerGraph replaced traditional relational/matrix approaches by modeling the grid as a native graph, eliminating costly joins and mapping steps, running massively parallel node/edge computations, and storing solved values as graph attributes. Deployed in a provincial power bus system, the TigerGraph-based EMS prototype reduced total execution time from 26.3 s (commercial EMS) to 1.02 s, with state estimation 172 ms (vs. 4,488 ms), power flow 79 ms (vs. 3,817 ms) and contingency analysis 772 ms (vs. 18,000 ms), achieving the first viable faster-than-real-time EMS for commercial use.

State Grid Corporation of China

Guangyi Liu

CTO of GEIRI North America