25 Distributed Energy Resources
Centralized energy generally refers to utility-scale power generators (or energy storage) hooked up directly to the transmission grid: coal or natural gas plants, wind farms, solar fields, grid-scale battery stacks, what have you. The big stuff.
Distributed energy consists of anything that generates, stores, or manages electricity on distribution grids: rooftop solar panels, ground-mounted “community solar” arrays, consumer batteries, electric vehicles, building energy management software, and the like.
A new way to model the energy system that takes into account DERs and the services they provide. They used it to study the effect of DERs on the electricity system and the results are summarized in “A New Roadmap for the Lowest Cost Grid.”.
The cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.
The practical implication is that going all out on DERs is to everyone’s benefit, up and down the electricity supply chain, from utilities to consumers.
It is difficult to exaggerate just what a revolutionary change this represents in energy modeling and how much it turns conventional wisdom on its head. By making distribution grids visible to their model and co-optimizing those grids with the transmission system, the team at VCE uncovered a source of grid flexibility that could save a decarbonizing electricity system some half a trillion dollars through 2050. That’s real money.