Demand management, carbon reduction, and distributed energy resources. These innovations are crucial to the grid’s future, but they have a significant impact now. 

To combat climate change, the electric grid must be decarbonized. Thankfully, decarbonization is also increasingly the wise economical choice. Legacy fossil fuel facilities that need a constant supply of filthy feedstock are very much the old way of doing things, as we mentioned above. 

Large-scale solar offers price stability for the future of energy because of their zero fuel cost and low operational and maintenance requirements. This is significantly preferable compared to fossil fuels, which are subject to price fluctuations owing to various variables such as war, trade disputes, and other geopolitical issues. Building new solar power plants is frequently less expensive than maintaining coal power plants currently in operation and developing new natural gas facilities. 

Of course, there will need to be methods for dealing with significant amounts of “excess” renewable energy due to the erratic nature of solar and wind power. Upgrades to the transmission network and energy storage will probably be necessary to do it, which will raise the cost. 

Thankfully, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act already include financing for those enhancements. These legislation programs encourage battery storage and new transmission infrastructure to enable the system to incorporate more renewable energy sources and make it simpler for grid managers to respond to emergencies. 

Similarly to rooftop solar panels, household batteries are distributed energy resources (DERs). These gadgets are fantastic for households since they offer backup power during a power outage and aid in lowering energy costs in jurisdictions that offer net metering. 

But thanks to FERC Order 2222, which will let DERs participate in wholesale energy markets once its design is complete, the future promises a new route for DERs. This does not imply that individual battery owners would enter RTO auctions to bid on generating capacity. Instead, aggregators will manage networks of distributed energy resources (DERs), often known as “virtual power plants” (VPPs), and DER owners will share in the financial rewards of the services the VPP provides to the market. In California, Sonnen maintains a VPP where they sell capacity to CAISO and pay their customers monthly. Tesla users may also get paid by joining a VPP to assist the PG&E grid. 

Even though existing solar and battery solutions can assist you in getting electricity in a grid outage, they only do a little to aid your neighbors (yet). The future of the grid will be more interconnected and automated than ever thanks to smart electrical panels and appliances, solar panels, and linked house batteries, enabling every circuit in your home to contribute to assuring grid dependability for everyone.

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