AOE Part II: DERs and Local Resilience

In order to build efficient, combustion-based generators, we needed to build them at economies of scale and extensive transmission and distribution networks to transport power along with them. Those wires are vulnerable to being knocked out by storms (or even squirrels), leading to blackouts, or supply shortages leading to cascading failure. That w... See more

Resiliency is DERs killer app. I’d like to do a study of how much search traffic from users asking “how can I install a battery in my house?” spikes after wildfires in CA, hurricanes in NY, or big freezes in Texas once again knock out the power grid. This is a now universal problem and overtime, resiliency benefits will lead to more and more users ... See more

And when was the last time you tried to go to fill up your tank and you couldn’t because there was no fuel? The 70's? That was one of the worst existential crises our real economy has faced since the Great Depression. This is a far more frequent occurrence on the electricity grid: nodes can’t function individually, unlike how cars and boilers can.

The future grid will be built from the bottom up, driven by new technologies, DERs, that are in many ways superior to their predecessors.