Renewable Energy World | By: John Bringenberg | September 18, 2017:
The next stratum of electricity and grid development over the coming two decades appears more and more clear. Major utilities methodically move through the regulatory and practical deployment of smarter communicating grid technology and advanced metering. This continues the centralized command and control type system that has been in place since the original wires were strung in Manhattan by Edison’s DC and the Westinghouse AC companies.
Meanwhile, two side by side developments bring an opposing force to this command/control legacy system. One — distributed resources themselves; and two — the communications and software applications to manage them.
These market developments are not unlike the dramatic shift from large scale central computing to personal computers in the ’80s and ’90s, followed by the dramatic increase in networking and near ubiquity of internet access that has spawned distributed smart programs and “X,Y,Z as a Service” applications.
From Cray to the smart phone in your pocket, we now interact with this vast cloudlike distributed application platform every hour.
Yet there is a third development: much less pedestrian in computing … which signals the real power of aggregation.
Parallelism
Parallelism in the zero-one world uses many dispersed but coordinated small-scale computers to work collectively in parallel on massive compute problems, such as climate, astronomy, forecasts and other complex calculations. Bringing intelligence, software and communications to DERs will have a similar effect on electricity generation, conservation and distribution.
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