Leveraging energy & information infrastructures

Abstract

Summary form only given. Access to affordable and reliable energy has been a cornerstone of the world's increasing prosperity and economic growth since the beginning of the industrial revolution about 250 years ago. Since then we have built our energy infrastructure worth several Trillions of dollars, which is an icon of any modern economy. More recently, we have been and will continue to build the infrastructure for communication and computing. However, the energy and information infrastructures are largely separate, ie they really have not been leveraged. In this talk, I will discuss one of several leveraging opportunities. Our grid architecture is about 100 years old, and is a legacy of the innovations Tesla, Edison and their industrial partners introduced. The architecture is based on centralized generation, a transmission system and a distribution network, with one-way electrical power flow. However, solar and wind electricity could easily become the cheapest way to produce electricity within this decade, battery storage will become cheaper as well, and network communication is widely available. None of these features were available 100 years ago. This techno-economic convergence will introduce two significant transitions for our grid - one that will require a layer of communication, computation and control to manage the grid, and the second that will combine centralized and distributed generation and storage. This talk will outline some of the opportunities and challenges in this transition.