Getting Smarter with Grid Design

Massive investments to overhaul our aging power grid are
underway, but it’s going to require significant planning to be
successful.


In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg sits down with
Ron Ambrosio, an energy transformation professional, to talk
about getting smarter and more deliberate how we plan for the
future.


“One of the key themes that we’re trying to educate the industry
on is the importance of not just looking at forward incremental
steps and design, but also the importance of looking at that
endgame and doing analysis on that from an architectural
perspective,” said Ambrosio.


“The endgame is reducing carbon fuels, trying to depend on
renewable energy more and more and trying to expand to the use of
distributed energy resources.”


Limits on the grid today are delaying the deployments of new grid
assets. 


“That bottleneck partially reflects the fact that our current
grid design does have limitations in what it can absorb
today.” 


Ambrosio noted that, when it comes to planning, we will always
have the issue needing new transmission.


“There’s a lot of evolution that the distribution systems need to
go through in order to accommodate a very high penetration of
more distributed renewable energy and other types of DER
resources.” 


Ambrosio is former chief technology officer of smarter energy
research at the IBM TJ Walton Research Center and former chairman
of the Gridwise Architecture Council. He is a senior technical
executive and scientist with a focus on technology, business and
policy issues related to energy transformation in the electricity
industry. He has 40 years of software engineering experience in
distributed, real-time systems and their interoperability with
enterprise computing environments, and 20 years of experience
specifically in the energy transformation space.