Invest in unseen infrastructure to support the grid assets we already have

Credit: Westinghouse Solar

Federal funding can help us build a cleaner, stronger and smarter grid with the assets we already have

By Connor Waldoch

In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law. The IIJA pledges over $65 billion in funding towards decarbonizing the power and transmission sectors, increasing supply and enhancing reliability.

In the months since the act’s signing, a sizable portion of the funding programs have been announced. The funding targets identified so far have largely focused on much-needed hardware upgrades, like building new transmission lines, upgrading generation plants, commercializing long-duration energy storage and developing an electric vehicle (EV) network. These technologies will go a long way towards building a stronger, more resilient grid.

However, in pursuit of the act’s goal of “Building a Better Grid,” it is critical that we not only invest in updates to the grid’s hardware — we also need to upgrade the way that the grid works.

A key path towards improving our grid is to invest in its “unseen” infrastructure — the physical and virtual technologies that unlock the full capabilities of distributed energy and empower demand to react to supply, making our grid smarter, more responsive, and more flexible.

Investing in our unseen infrastructure will be as essential to a clean energy future as building more transmission, renewables and EV chargers. By taking a holistic view of how grid modernization can take shape, we can simultaneously address the needs for decarbonization, reliability, and the growing imbalance between power supply and demand.

What makes up our unseen infrastructure?

Our modern grid is more than just the centralized power plants, transmission lines and distribution networks that bring our power to us. It is also made up of the hundreds of millions of grid-connected assets, representing endpoints that are some of the most flexible, intelligent parts of the grid.

These endpoints — also called distributed energy resources (DERs) — consist of rooftop solar, home battery systems, EV chargers and smart thermostats, as well as smart buildings, commercial facilities and even industrial water pumping facilities. DERs are already connected to the grid and are multiplying rapidly, and can help us reach our grid modernization goals.

The beauty of DERs is that they can be powered up or down more flexibly, cleanly, and cheaply than legacy centralized power plants. The issue is that DERs have little access to the mechanisms and markets the grid uses to source its energy.

One way unseen infrastructure can solve this is through software that networks DERs together into a virtual power plant, or VPP, that can interact with the grid just like a physical power plant does.

When electric demand in a given region is at its highest, the utility or grid operator can either call upon its peaker plants (often the dirtiest, costliest, and least-efficient power plants) to generate more energy — or it can call upon its diverse array of VPPs to reduce or inject energy, thereby balancing the grid and reducing emissions at the same time.

DERs, VPPs and other technologies that make up our unseen infrastructure help keep the power on and make better use of clean energy.

Transforming our power system

Today’s power grid operates in a completely different world than the one it was initially built to serve. After a long period of flat or declining load growth, energy consumption is beginning to climb, and the electrification of everything will take demand to unprecedented levels while usage patterns diverge from long standing norms.

Rapid changes to the distribution and character of both supply and demand, disruptions from climate-driven weather events, and outdated 20th century market design — have demonstrated that the United States’ energy infrastructure does not only critically need more grid hardening, but also grid flexibility and diversification of energy resources. The current grid has substantial underutilized capacity in the form of flexible DERs, but these endpoints have been tethered by legacy processes that limit their ability to respond to these events. For example, Texas could have leveraged millions of connected technologies during the 2021 winter outages to mitigate costs to both providers and consumers. 

Our need for a more flexible, more reliable and cleaner grid is urgent, and the urgency, as well as our opportunity to meet those needs with distributed energy resources, grows by the day. The IIJA presents an unprecedented opportunity to build the better grid we need, and we can’t afford to ignore the powerful, unseen tools at our disposal.

About the Author

Connor Waldoch is a Senior Manager in Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Leap and previously launched and managed Leap’s market operations in New York. Prior to Leap, Connor was a consultant working in the monitoring and design of energy and carbon markets as well as a researcher in renewable energy economics for the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Connor can be found tweeting about energy at https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch.

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