Guest Post: Towards a Distributed, Intelligent Electric Grid

This is a guest post by Robert Fares, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin researching the benefits of grid energy storage as part of Pecan Street Inc.'s ongoing smart grid demonstration project . Robert is contributing a series of guest posts discussing grid storage technologies, and how storage could benefit the electric grid. You can read the previous posts in his series here , here , and here . - David In my last post, I discussed how transformer-level batteries could work to isolate clusters of houses during an outage to form microgrids powered by rooftop solar panels. A logical extension of this concept is the idea of residential energy storage: home-sized batteries that would enable a house with adequate solar to produce all of the electricity it needs and more. Houses could be connected in such a way that they balance electricity supply and demand in a market-like framework. Such a system would revolutionize the electric grid by transforming ordinary utility customers into producer-consumers or "prosumers," each with the ability to act as a generator or consumer in the wider electricity marketplace. [More]
Source: Scientific American - Official RSS Feed - Category: Science Tags: Energy & Sustainability Source Type: research