Introduction
The world is about to change in more dramatic ways than most people realize. In regions where electricity prices are high and solar energy plentiful (e.g., Hawaii), the solar option has become viable even without subsidies. It is held back only by the inability to exceed penetration levels that utilities find acceptable, which is typically 15% or lower.
End-User Energy Storage Systems
The solution to attain 100% penetration of solar and to greatly increase the resiliency and reliability of the grid does not lie on the ability of utilities to deal with greater penetration of renewable resources. It lies instead on the ability of customers to install end-user energy storage systems of sufficient size and capacity to completely alter the utility-customer relationship.
Utilities of the future will not need to provide 100% reliability to an increasingly variable and uncertain load/generation mix. Rather, they will act as “charging stations” for customer-owned and operated Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems.
With utilities in the mix, as opposed to “off the grid” systems, customers can benefit by needing much smaller storage systems. They also will benefit from the utility as a “backup provider of power.”
Utilities, in turn, will benefit by having loads that can match almost any production pattern and by selling only the most efficiently produced power.
This relationship also allows customers to be immune to short-duration and medium-duration outages, as well as become isolated from transients and other disturbances in the grid.
The Future of the Grid
A further aspect of this evolution of the grid is that utilities will be able to deal with congestion more effectively. Utilities will be able to utilize their transmission assets far more effectively than they could without this level of flexibility.
To survive, utilities will need to embrace this new role rather than fight it. Those that resist risk being bypassed by increasing numbers of customers that choose to go off-the-grid.
We predict this new utility-customer relationship trend will start in Hawaii and work its way up through the southwest and eventually to the entire United States. We also anticipate that the trend will involve the whole world within a decade.
For this to happen, society needs to address the social aspects of this equation. Society must make sure customers that cannot afford the initial investments needed to make the transition are helped along so they are not left without a reliable source of power.
About the article: This concept was originally proposed by the author back in 2014, but these same ideas still apply to what we’re currently seeing in the energy industry.
