The rise of electric vehicle (EV) transportation and electrified heavy industry plants present substantial new demands that the grid must accommodate. A third source of increased demand stems from incentives to convert fossil-based home heating to heat pumps. These emerging sources of demand are bringing about significant changes to peak power needs and the grid’s load profile. While the integration of additional solar and wind power generation aims to deliver additional capacity for these changes, the variable and imperfectly predictable output from these renewable sources necessitates a substantial enhancement in system flexibility for electric utilities to deliver sufficient capacity.

Technology offers a range of valuable solutions to bolster the flexibility of electric utilities. Here are some approaches that can be employed:

1. Use multiple power storage methods capable of storing surplus renewable energy and functioning as a backup power supply during periods of peak demand.
2. Transition to smaller autonomous substations, and increasing their number, to efficiently serve specific regions and automatically redirect power as needed.
3. Encourage grid-connected renewable energy systems installed on-site at customers’ premises to satisfy local energy needs.
4. Invest in improved nuclear power options that can generate a reliable baseline of electric capacity.

Power outages pose a serious public safety and economic concern, underscoring the need for prioritizing power-grid security. All aspects of the grid, from generation to transmission, require protection from numerous threats. Extreme weather events require resilient and robust infrastructure. Potential cyberattacks from adversarial governments, terrorists, and cyber criminals necessitate strict cybersecurity measures. Even localized incidents like copper theft or vandalism can disrupt regional power distribution without adequate security in place.

In order to help safeguard the power grid, numerous technology-driven initiatives can be explored. These include:

1. Perform a threat and vulnerability analysis to uncover potential threats, weaknesses, risks, and effective mitigations for critical grid infrastructure.
2. Augment existing physical security solutions with intelligent security lights, video and thermal cameras, and intercoms at substations, power farms, and transmission lines.
3. Ensure that all digital infrastructure components adhere to best-practice cybersecurity technology.
4. Share information regarding physical attacks, digital attacks, and threat methodologies with government intelligence, law enforcement, and other relevant sector partners.

Creating a highly adaptable electrical system while improving its distribution capacity – in other words, making the grid “smarter” – requires digitization of existing equipment. This digital transformation provides an opportunity to upgrade the underlying components since approximately 20 percent of electric grids worldwide need replacing within the next decade. Accommodating the demands of flexible power routing not only requires upgrading existing infrastructure, but also implementing new switching equipment, transformers, meters, and other critical elements.

Several measures can be undertaken to achieve modernization:

1. Implement management systems for wide-area monitoring and control to provide comprehensive visualization and oversight of the entire system.
2. Integrate distributed energy resources management systems (DERMS) to effectively manage dynamically changing distribution patterns.
3. Automate substations to streamline operations, enable real-time responsiveness, and capture valuable data for analysis and future improvements.
4. Install residential smart meters that can understand and collect demand-side data, especially as consumers interact with the grid in novel ways through EVs and solar panels.