Smart Grid Library

The cards dealt to the energy storage industry are looking better now than in the past. Here are three of them, all played because of the growing presence of Smart Grid technologies that enable solutions and policies that encourage energy storage markets. One wild card is also listed here, and it could have significant influence [...]

The Smart Grid offers ample opportunities to introduce disruptive technologies and disruptive thinking into the electricity supply chain.  Indeed, disruptive technologies and services that enable electricity production at the point of consumption or close to the point of consumption are prime examples of how the entire value chain for electricity may alter in the next [...]

A school district in Silicon Valley is adding a 1.26 MW photovoltaic (PV) solar installation across several campuses to deliver about 45% of their annual electricity needs.  The ground-mounted facilities will be placed as canopies in school parking lots, so the shading provided by the panels can also reduce the air conditioning burden on the [...]

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is convening in Cancun, Mexico from November 29 to December 10 to discuss reduction strategies for global warming and funding for programs developing nations can put in place to mitigate the impacts of climate changes.   Can the Smart Grid solve climate change?  No, but it can reduce the amounts [...]

California voters convincingly voted down the attempt by certain oil companies to abandon clean air legislation to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions first enacted back in 2006.  The vote breakdown shows that regardless of party affiliation, voters in all but 17 of the state’s 58 counties rejected this proposition summed up in a lopsided 61% to [...]

Distributed generation (DG) is one important realization of the Smart Grid to improve grid reliability and add jobs to local economies.  At residential, microgrid or utility-scale levels, DG increases options for powering the distribution grid in the event of centralized generation or transmission failures.  Last week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) clarified an earlier [...]

Our electrical grid is a magnificent machine, but it is an aging infrastructure that is expected to deliver more electricity to more consumers, creating capacity stresses to equipment.  Transmission lines are constructed to safely deliver high voltages of electricity from generation plants to substations for distribution to residential and C&I (commercial and industrial) consumers.  Like [...]

 There are two schools of thought about how the Smart Grid will evolve.  One promotes a “system of systems” view, in which the current centralized structure continues to be the dominant model, and the other focuses on an interconnected network of microgrids.  There are pros and cons to each approach, but just like the old [...]

The NARUC (National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners) Summer Committee Meetings last week revealed a few sobering projections about our future electrical supply.  First, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) anticipates that the cost of electricity will increase by 50% by 2030 even with use of all possible energy sources from fossil fuels to renewables.  [...]

My mother is writing a book.  She learned how to use a computer, and has been diligently crafting her story chapter by chapter.  If only the local electric grid would cooperate.  A single power disruption of a few seconds wiped out an entire chapter of her book.  Now she is reworking a previous version and [...]