Every month you pay an electricity bill, because thereβs no choice if you want to keep the lights on. The power flows in one direction. But soon, utilities might desperately need something from you: electricity.
A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system. If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the βgrid edgeβ β household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way. More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy.
The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet β millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utilityβs systems. To address that problem, a team... Read more
