How to advance the decentralized grid

Source: Elisa Wood | · LINKEDIN · | October 22, 2023

Many of you know me as a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Microgrid Knowledge and a writer for S&P Global Platts before that.

Now I’m starting something new, something different, to advance the creation of the decentralized grid and help those working on distributed energy resources (DERs).

Before I get into what I’m doing, let’s look at the good and the bad of working in the DER space now.

The good

In my 30 years of writing about energy, I’ve not seen the stars align like this. Distributed energy resources (DERs) are enjoying technological success and unprecedented government incentives — especially in the US, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and federal infrastructure bill. In addition, the financing community is keenly interested in new energy technology, and there is growing public support. Electric vehicle adoption, alone, is expected to grow 35% in 2023.

The bad

But as all of you working in DERs know, that’s still not enough.

Despite this support, you often find yourself struggling to build DER projects because our electric grid is designed for another century, governed by rules that no longer make sense, and dominated by economic models created to encourage big power plants and long transmission lines — not the energy of the future, which is nimble, local, clean distributed energy.

So how do we change that?

As business guru Ken Blanchard says, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”