Our nation’s electricity infrastructure will be upgraded into an efficient, secure, reliable, adaptable machine! But the slow smart grid evolution will be achieved with smaller steps. What does short term smart grid future look like? Read on for current smart grid trends.
Demand Response is an increasingly popular component in addressing our nation’s aging electrical grid. Currently a fragmented market, Demand Response will be experiencing consolidation and growth as more businesses implement programs to achieve cost reduction and energy savings.
As a time-limited $19.5 billion market opportunity, meter and communications suppliers with be working with utilities around the world on replacing typical home and business electric meters with Smart Meters. Be prepared for empowered decision making around your business’s energy usage and energy costs.
The first comprehensive update to Unites States wind potential estimates in 17 years helps renewable energy proponents by providing solid data for development and legislation. However, the wind power industry needs an improved electrical grid in order to transport and sell wind-generated energy…
As our nation’s electrical grid needs to be transformed in to a Smart Grid to avoid becoming even more of an economic and security risk. It’s time for a major overhaul complete with automation, two-way communication, real-time information, and decentralized production & distribution networks.
Redwood Systems has launched a network-based LED lighting technology for commercial buildings. It optimizes energy-efficiency for commercial lighting and provides comprehensive sensor data for building performance.
The recent announcement of billions of dollars of federal funding for smart grid demonstration projects is of particular interest to people who have been involved in thinking about how modernizing the electric grid can bring new benefits to consumers. Many projects awarded have a dynamic pricing option that gives customers access to an electric rate that varies across each day, and provides incentives to manage peak electric demand; and some projects feature a real-time pricing model based on the wholesale electricity market prices. For these projects to truly benefit consumers, it is essential to think about dynamic pricing from the consumer’s point of view.
President Obama, speaking at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center, announced the largest single energy grid modernization investment in U.S. history. The newly announced funding is designed to help the nation transition to a smarter, stronger, more efficient and reliable electric system i.e. the Smart Grid, which will provide energy-saving opportunities, increase efficiency, and help grow renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Distributed energy systems can range from the micro sized do it yourself systems being installed on rooftops and on hilltops to small scale systems ranging up to around 20MW (megawatts) of capacity, although it must be understood that this is a pretty fuzzy boundary. The defining characteristic of distributed energy systems is that they generate energy close to the point of use where that energy will be consumed; hence the admittedly fuzzy 20MW upper boundary for their size.
