Desmond Wheatley is President and CEO of Beam Global, an electric vehicle charging technologies company.
We live during an era in which technologies that seemed like science fiction just a quarter of a century ago are now commonplace in our everyday lives. And yet the power that makes them all operate is still delivered by infrastructure that has been in existence for over 100 years with almost no fundamental improvement during that time. In my view, the utility grid is simply not able to reliably deliver the most essential commodity that human beings rely on today after water, air and food. As the CEO of a clean energy company and the holder of multiple renewable energy patents, I am deeply concerned about the consequences of our vulnerable grid.
We have seen frozen natural gas supplies and blackouts caused by consumers turning up their AC during heatwaves disrupt electricity supplies with increasing regularity. There are recorded instances in which bad actors have deliberately shut down sections of the grid by attacking substations and other infrastructure, and we are now aware of the potential of cyber attacks to penetrate our vital utility infrastructure.
The fact that bad weather or high consumer demand can cause our most vital infrastructure to fail is antithetical to the course being charted by every other industry. Imagine if Amazon simply stopped delivering packages because people were ordering too many items. Consumers would be unforgiving if this happened, and yet find themselves so conditioned to grid failure that blackouts are received with (mostly) quiet stoicism.
Solving for this strange and increasingly insupportable stasis in our most vital infrastructure will require a multi-faceted strategy. I think we need more generation quickly and decentralization of infrastructure to protect us from the single points of failure which create vulnerability. And we need electricity delivered to highly diverse locations in ways which were never imagined by the original architects of the utility grid. Solutions to these challenges exist today. Among the potential solutions, microgrids, nanogrids and even “quantum grids” can scale rapidly, increase resiliency and react to rapid shifts in demand in ways which the centralized grid will never be able to mimic. As an enhancement to the grid, they can help us ensure that our increasingly electrified future is met with a robust and sufficient supply of what will become the fuel that powers everything.
Leave a Reply