Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

How the Digital Grid Is Powering the Renewable Energy Era

Renewable Energy World: In the early 20th century, countries in North America and Europe began constructing their electric grids — the networked system of power generation and delivery infrastructure that would bring, for the first time, electricity to homes and businesses at the flip of a switch.

These networks worked for decades because centrally-supplied power generation models were the norm and efficiency, flexibility and environmental sensitivity were less important than they are today. Flash forward 100 years and these same grids still serve as the backbone to the electricity generation and transmission systems in their regions.

To serve twenty-first century needs, these legacy grids need the ability to accommodate new demands such as intermittent generation sources and increasingly ubiquitous distributed energy resources (DERs) located throughout the transmission network.

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