Someone wiser than this page’s editor once quipped: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”
Introducing renewables to the grid has surely been a slow process, but something got lost in translation on the way to the “smooth” part; from interconnection woes to lackluster incentives for rooftop solar. But even if that piece of the puzzle falls into place, it won’t mean a thing to the people paying the bills if they can’t rely on electricity at the flick of a switch.
Reliability was a focus at the recent Itron Inspire event in San Antonio, Texas, where Itron CEO Tom Deitrich sat down with Clarion Events Vice President of Transmission and Distribution Stephanie Kolodziej to discuss how utilities are preparing for the energy transition (if being prepared is even possible). Check it out:
The problem of reliability “expresses itself in terms of climate disruption, more floods and fires and storms, or droughts or ice storms,” Deitrich explained. “It doesn’t matter where in the world you are. It’s happening.”
Deitrich prefers an “all-of-the-above” approach to solving the energy transition, noting hydrogen or any other single renewable resource won’t be enough on its own. Additional problems arise when accounting for hydrogen, specifically – piping, connections, and systems have to be tight to handle smaller hydrogen molecules.
“There’s plenty of technical challenges (as well as) cost challenges with hydrogen,” Deitrich said. “I think that that will take some time, but I think we have to enable it and think about it.”
Deitrich is glad to see that utilities are not “burying their head in the sand” when it comes to preparing for the energy transition but notices the industry struggling to keep up.
“I don’t know that anyone could be fully prepared given the complexity of the problem that we’re dealing with,” he admitted.
Fortunately, Deitrich said, the industry has a lot of tools to deploy – but agility and flexibility are key.
“How you think you are going to use them today and how you will use them 10 years from now are probably very, very different,” Deitrich said.
