Electrifying Everything: Let's Get Flexible

The cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.The... See more

The key to the value of DERs is that they make electricity demand more controllable. With energy generation and storage scattered throughout distribution grids, grid operators have a way to move energy around, both geographically and temporally, without firing up more power plants. They can absorb extra energy if there’s a dip in demand or produce ... See more

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

By bringing demand more under grid operators’ control, DERs virtually eliminate curtailment, or discarding of renewable energy due to temporary oversupply, through 2045. Just as they allow transmission to be used more effectively, they allow us to consume more of the energy generated by existing utility-scale renewables.

Though it will require enormous upfront investment in the coming decade, laying a quilt of DERs over the nation’s distribution systems is the best thing we can possibly do to enable the rapid emission reductions we will need in the decade after.