Since the late 1800s, power grids have been connecting electricity providers to citizens in cities all over the US. For several decades, these grids were rightly considered an engineering feat of the modern world. They were designed to allow electricity to flow from massive power plants through a network, allowing people to instantly turn on home appliances. And while these networks are still being used, they are in dire need of updating to meet the needs that come with an increased demand for renewable energy. The challenges to migrate the US electrical grid to green energy are massive. For example, the current and dated grid is designed to deliver electricity in one direction: from the energy plant to a person’s home. Rather than store electricity, the plants generate and send it through transmission and distribution lines. Green energy, on the other hand, requires storage systems in order to work properly in a distribution network. Unlike the energy that is continuously generated in power plants, energy from wind and solar comes and goes; it does not flow continuously. As such, the aging grid in the US would need to be redesigned to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of energy that needs to be stored.
So, the use of green energy will require a system update. The old US grid has grown to be inefficient and is increasingly failing . In fact, some experts say that it was never designed to be efficient. Thankfully, blockchain has the ability to become a bridge for the renewable energy shift, by facilitating current peer-to-peer energy sharing solutions and accommodating the influx of electric vehicles.
More stakeholders will enter the power grid in the near future
According to the US Solar Market Insight , the third quarter of 2018 saw 1.7 gigawatts (GW) […]