| | DECEMBER - JANUARY9pose additional challenges. How can you balance a grid comprised not of dozens of power plants but thousands that you don’t even own?Grids that have the intelligence to balance themselves with little human support must be the norm. Something that must be hand in hand with a strong investment in security. Episodes like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack we had in the US will continue to happen if security isn’t a top priority.Additionally, smart grids may also open new business models, and operators must be on the lookout. If you can control the fridge of your customer (after he allows it), can you prevent turning on a Peaker plant by lowering momentarily the consumption the grid is doing?Or simply empowering customers with products that enable them to be aware of how they use energy and how to optimize that usage?StorageBecause of the intermittence of renewables, storage is another challenge to tackle. The sun doesn’t shine all day, so you need to have the ability of storing that excess energy during the day and then use it at night. Also, it doesn’t shine the same throughout the year, so longer term storage is needed (months or years) to guarantee that seasons aren’t an issue. And this also applies in the same fashion to other renewables.Electric vehiclesElectric vehicles have a central role in this transition. They can serve as batteries for the grid, as most of the time they aren’t being used, and here we already have had trials over the last years in vehicle to grid (V2G) or vehicle to load (V2L), where your car can even “charge” your house.As we are starting to see thousands of BEV rolling of factories by the day, they can play an important role stabilizing the grid. Consuming (storing) energy in peak production times and releasing it in times of need. As a conclusion, we have interesting times ahead in the energy sector. It will require a lot of research to create the needed technologies (for example using blockchain to transparently control distributed devices) and bring the cost down (as we’ve seen in solar or wind in the last years). Companies must change their processes and adapt to a new way of producing energy, as well as understanding how to have not customers but business partners as we shift to a dimension where people are prosumers and not only consumers.All in all “may you live in interesting times” fits perfectly on what is ahead.The opinions shared are my own and do not represent the entities I work for. Companies must change their processes and adapt to a new way of producing energy, as well as understanding how to have not customers but business partners as we shift to a dimension where people are prosumers and not only consumers
< Page 8 | Page 10 >