The control room is quietly becoming the most consequential piece of infrastructure in growth-market power systems. As variable renewables take a larger share of the generation mix and demand becomes harder to forecast, the ability to see the network in real time and act within minutes has moved from a nice-to-have to a precondition for keeping the lights on.
Historically, many transmission and distribution operators in emerging markets ran with limited visibility below the transmission level. Faults were reported by customers rather than detected by sensors, and dispatch decisions were made on hourly or daily schedules. That model breaks down when a large share of supply depends on the weather and a growing share of load comes from air conditioning, industry and, increasingly, vehicle charging.
The response has been a wave of investment in supervisory control and data acquisition, distribution management systems and the sensor networks that feed them. What is notable in recent procurements is the shift from pilot deployments to system-wide rollouts, often financed alongside transmission upgrades rather than as standalone IT projects.
Three things are driving the change. First, the economics of curtailment: without visibility, operators curtail renewables conservatively, wasting energy that has already been paid for. Second, reliability targets attached to concessional finance increasingly specify outage frequency and duration, which cannot be met without measurement. Third, the cost of the hardware itself has fallen far enough that instrumenting the medium-voltage network is no longer prohibitive.
The bottleneck is now people rather than equipment. Control rooms need engineers trained on the new platforms, and cybersecurity has become a board-level concern as operational networks are connected to corporate ones. Expect the next round of tenders to weight training, support and security more heavily than the software licence itself.
Background: from hourly schedules to real-time operation
Modern control centres combine energy management systems for transmission, advanced distribution management systems (ADMS) for the network below, wide-area monitoring using phasor measurement units, and forecasting for renewables and load. The IEA’s work on grids and IRENA’s system-integration studies both identify digital operation as one of the cheapest sources of flexibility, and development banks including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank fund control-centre modernisation as part of grid programmes. The technical foundations are standards-based: IEC 61850 for substation communications, IEC 61970/61968 (the Common Information Model) for data exchange, and IEC 62443 for security.
What to watch
- Distribution visibility programmes, where the biggest gains are, see grid operators add sensing below transmission level.
- Substation digitalisation, moving from pilots to fleet roll-outs, see substation digitalisation.
- Renewable forecasting and curtailment management, essential where solar and wind are constrained, see Grid access and curtailment explained.
- Cybersecurity requirements in every control-system tender, see cybersecurity requirements enter utility procurement.
- Storage and DER integration, as batteries and rooftop solar become dispatchable resources.
What it means for suppliers to utilities and OEMs
Control-centre projects are multi-year, integration-heavy procurements that bring together software vendors, RTU and protection suppliers, telecoms and system integrators. Utilities score interoperability, local support and security heavily and typically require pilots before fleet contracts; the process is described in How to sell to utilities in emerging markets. Follow programme announcements on our grid reliability page.
Sources and further reading
- IEA, Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions, grid digitalisation analysis
- IRENA, Power system transformation, system-integration reports
- IEC 61850 and IEC 62443, communications and security standards
- World Bank, Energy, utility modernisation programmes
This article was researched and written by the EnergiTech Media editorial team and last reviewed in August 2026. We update country and sector guides as tenders, plans and regulations change. Spotted something out of date? Email support@energitechmedia.com.