Date: November 2025

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) and ICF partnered to explore how digital twins can unlock locational demand flexibility and defer costly grid upgrades. This case study focuses on a substation in rapidly growing area with imminent infrastructure investment needs. Our objective was to create a comprehensive digital blueprint of the substation—past, present, and future—by calibrating digital twins of over 4,200 residential customers against AMI and substation-level data. This enabled us to simulate load growth scenarios and assess the impact of various DER measures such as air sealing, heat pumps, and battery storage. By modeling these interventions at the individual home level and aggregating their effects, we quantified the locational value of DERs in peak reduction. The analysis reveals how this process can be a simple addition to distribution planning for high-level screening for NWA potential.

Speakers:
Abhishek Jain, ICF
Ryan Edge, SMECO