What's the Problem with DERs?

I have spent more than 15 years working to advance distributed energy resources (DERs), at this point, and it's clear that DERs are technologically to the point where they have been proven time and time again and can be relied on like any other utility or grid assets. However, it's still very difficult to monetize the value that DERs can provide because there are not mechanisms in place, in most energy markets, to compensate them for what they can do. For startups that are trying to commercialize services that can be provided by distributed energy storage systems like orchestrated behind-the-meter load control and/or solar+storage, it's very frustrating to know that these products can perform as well as traditional utility grid assets, but can't be paid for doing so.

The next area of innovation in clean energy must focus on solving this problem. The technology barriers are not what they once were. DER hardware and software are advanced enough to provide consistent, reliable, utility-grade services. DERs are key to a modern grid. Figuring out how to unlock their value from a market perspective is what needs to happen next and this is what I'm focused on.

Comments

What is Power Ledger's play in the energy blockchain space?

Power Ledger is building an energy blockchain platform to connect all of the players of the energy ecosystem together - prosumers, consumers, market operators, utilities, etc. They want to “enable interoperability between diverse market management/pricing mechanisms and units of electricity (kWh) by way of pre-purchased tokens.” Here's my take on what they are up to. Business Model / Offering Power Ledger's offering is a blockchain-based platform that facilitates participation by “all” parties in the energy ecosystem, called the Platform. Utilities and other 3rd-party businesses that will facilitate trading on the platform are called Application Hosts. Examples of Application Hosts include energy retailers, property managers, and EV-charging businesses. Participants are the consumers or non-Application Hosts and the users. There will or can be an unlimited number of applications that run on the Power Ledger Platform. The first, and only one currently available, is FuseBox...

Intro Topic: Distributed Ledgers vs. Blockchains

What's the difference between distributed ledgers and blockchains? "Bits on Blocks" published a brief introduction on this topic earlier this year. The key takeaways from that article are pretty high level but still helpful when thinking about this. For example, this: If you want to include all the initiatives going on, use the term “distributed ledgers”. If you mean blockchains, where unrelated transactions are bundled into blocks, which are chained together using hashes and (in most cases) broadcast to all participating entities for batch processing, use “blockchains”. If you like acronyms, use “DLT”: Distributed Ledger Technology Colin Pratt also provided some very interesting detail on this concept along with a discussion on taxonomy in general in his blog post "Thoughts on the Taxonomy of Blockchains & Distributed Ledger Technologies." Colin highlights that Bitcoin's blockchain has some key features that really illustrate what makes it dif...

Can Grid+ actually disrupt energy markets in the US?

Overview Grid+ spun out of, and is owned by, New York blockchain development house ConsenSys. ConsenSys, which uses blockchain technology to create applications in many different fields, identified the opportunity to create a solution for the energy space. The goals of Grid+ are to demonstrate production-ready blockchain-based energy solutions at scale in competitive commercial environments in order to enable the transactive grid of the future and prove the advantages of Ethereum over incumbent technologies. To get started, Grid+’s strategy is to become an energy retailer in Texas and to win customers by offering energy savings compared to the incumbents. They will use their own hardware solution for energy management combined with efficiencies from trading using Ethereum. Their hardware solution is called the Intelligent Agent. It is a computer that basically pays for the customer’s electricity use in real time by reading from the smart meter. The Inte...

Energy Blockchain

Search This Blog