Grid Planning, Demand Response, and Energy Storage: How Businesses and Utilities can Benefit
Why Demand Response and Energy Storage are Increasingly Critical
The primary job of any utility is to make sure that supply and demand remain in balance, a job that’s of utmost importance 24/7/365. But, this is increasingly difficult as demand for energy continues to rise and the mix of generation types on the grid evolves. Together, these factors create additional strain on our aging grid, requiring utilities to find new methods to better prepare for the future.
The old method goes something like this: is more energy needed? Let’s build another power plant or construct new transmission wires to carry that energy where it’s needed. Job done! But continuing down this pathway is not only time-consuming and a great permitting challenge, but it’s also expensive, carbon-intensive, and amounts to a “band-aid” until power demand outstrips supply.
Today’s more nuanced strategy involves forward-looking utilities planning ahead via demand response programs (reducing or shifting electricity usage during peak periods in response to financial incentives), deploying non-wires alternatives (NWAs), and more energy storage solutions. Combined, these tools can help utilities, and therefore their customers, avoid outdated, costly, and carbon-intensive methods of adding capacity.
How Grid Planning Looks Today
Grid planning is as old as the power sector. But what today’s utilities are moving towards is smarter grid planning. The reality of today’s power sector is that energy is being generated in a more distributed fashion: e.g., rooftop solar in one corner of the grid, offshore wind turbines on the other end of the grid, and centralized fossil-fuel power plants in the middle, rather than just the centralized power plants many of us grew up with. Further, much of the new generation is intermittent (i.e., renewables only generate electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing). This means utilities cannot control when these assets will generate power, making electricity supply harder to predict—and control.
In short, delivering—and preparing for—grid reliability is a more complicated, but equally critical, task under our increasingly distributed, intermittent grid.