What Will the 21st Century Grid Look Like?

[T]he United States electricity system is undergoing more change, and faster, than it has in many decades.  Numerous factors are driving this change.  Among the most influential are:

• the resource mix is being turned on its head, including a large and rapid increase of clean renewable generation as technology and renewable power prices plummet;
• climate change actions are finally getting launched as President Obama gets serious in the absence of congressional effort (to say nothing of outright climate denial by GOP leaders) of any kind;
• energy efficiency and demand response – reducing the need for new generation and transmission – are increasingly large contributors to our energy and grid support needs;
• utility customers on the distribution grid are becoming  generators of power, no longer content to simply  consume power;
• lower cost unconventional gas resources are choking the life out of baseload conventional power sources like coal and nuclear energy; and,
• the need to contain costs as we meet present and future needs.

“Power outages are up 285 percent since 1984, and the U.S. ranks last among the top nine Western industrialized nations in the average length of outages, which the federal U.S. Energy Information Administration says cost businesses as much as $150 billion a year.”

What Will the 21st Century Grid Look Like?