Power Open-source
The energy transition calls for radical changes. How is the industry responding? The energy industry’s response has been dependent on geography. What is happening in the US is different to what is happening in Europe, Asia, Africa or South America. Energy and electricity are hyper-local issues and the energy transition is driving a distributed energy resource – a ‘generate local and consume local’ model, moving away from a 150-year-old centralised power plant model, which is organised around fossil fuel and nuclear and then transporting energy hundreds of miles. As a whole, the global energy industry is not innovating quickly enough. Many utility companies feel they need to go and do it on their own, but going it alone is impossible – all solutions associated with climate change fundamentally have to be collective. We can’t transform the energy sector with the same brain we used to create the energy sector. Transformation is key, and open-source is here to help. What infrastructure will be needed to accelerate the shift to clean energy? To accelerate the shift to clean energy, we
Q&A: Energy Focus talks to Dr Shuli Goodman, Executive Director of LF Energy – an open-source initiative bringing together the energy and tech industries to expedite the grid of the future
need power grids that can support a major increase in energy demands. This is because electric vehicles are critical to decarbonisation as well as the transition from fossil fuels, since automobiles will not only be a load, but also an energy-generating resource to the grid. To the degree that we shift transport and distribution demands, we can begin building micro-grids, or smaller fractal, self-similar grids that are composed into a larger grid infrastructure in economic industrial centres. In more remote areas, the smaller grids can operate autonomously. But developing this infrastructure quickly is a major challenge because none of our current electricity infrastructure was built with the future climate in mind. When it was first put in place, engineers took shortcuts to save money and time. These trade-offs guaranteed that future generations would have to come back and fix the systems later, at a high cost. No one took on the challenge, and now we are in need of a significant update. Modernising our current infrastructure while also building new sustainable infrastructure is an extremely slow and expensive process. We have a lot to do to rid ourselves of several generations’ worth of technical debt while managing the well-being of our planet and future generations.
Accelerating the energy transition
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