Jul. 18, 2024
Microgrid Knowledge sought out the prevailing wisdom of long-time industry leaders on the microgrid storylines driving this decade of possibilities and headwinds.
If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy.
Say what you want about Elon Musk, but his quote above is both simplistic and yet prescient to the nth degree about the world we live in (or should that be Xth degree?).
To go further into the lexicon of Muskspeak, the world is in tension between one side racing to create a new electricity ecosystem and the other side running a high-risk experiment that both the traditional grid or our atmosphere can handle what’s coming.
The editorial and industry leadership behind Microgrid Knowledge, of course, believes that the microgrid solution is the clearest and best choice offered at the intersection of sustainability and energy resiliency to date. Maybe something else will come along, but this makes the most sense yet.
Yes, microgrids are expensive and take a long time to go from concept to commission, but there is no other resource that can so efficiently combine the many paths to both decarbonization and adequately meeting enormous resource needs of the future. And they are not nearly as expensive as rebuilding and reallocating the utility transmission system.
Data center expansion, fueled by the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), is happening at such a breakneck pace that the world’s tech leaders such as Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI are seriously engaging with small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear technology startups to create future connections. Fleet electrification, as the world of electric vehicles such as Musk’s Tesla portends, will require an added allocation of power that must scare the heck out of utilities.
2030 is little more than five years away, dear reader, and all signs point to a revolution in energy that puts microgrids at the center of the new era.
Given all that, Microgrid Knowledge sought out the wisdom of many of the industry’s leaders on the most compelling storylines for microgrids in the 2020s. These include priorities about customer education to really make the argument for the microgrid value proposition, a sustained incentivization pathway and some resolution of the conflicts that invariably develop whenever a historic infrastructure is reinvented.
Click here to read the full article written by Rod Walton for microgridknowledge.com ↗