The Future of Electric Power in the United States – Part 1

Thanks for the comment and question, Matt.

It also inspired an idea for a future post.

The answer depends on the nature of the disruptive innovation. Several of these innovations are listed below along with how the future might play out for their development.

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS): The primary disruption here will be more efficient battery manufacturing processes that are being developed for EVs and will trickle down to the chemistries used for BESS (currently primarily LFP (LiFePO4 or Lithium Iron Phosphate). These will result in substantial price reductions at every scale. This will happen over the next two to five years.

Windpower: Offshore wind has a higher capacity factor and lower cost per unit energy. This will emerge in the U.S. East Coast first (2 to five years from now) and later for the West Coast.

Photovoltaic: The technologies for the current reduction curve are already in the field.  In the West, the PV's energy is already the least expensive. Repowering older arrays will continue this curve for the next 5 to 10 years.

Microgrids: This is the wild-card, because it's primary drivers are BESS, PV, and control systems, and all of these are on a downward price curve, and increasing capability.

Beyond five to ten years are where we will see new emergent  technologies appear and start additional market disruptions, so if a utility or utility product producer is trying to plan beyond 10 years, I  feel like they are wasting their time.

Microgrids are the future post. I have written several articles on using these to avoid wildfires in California, and this is a large market, but there are also much larger adjacent market segments that these systems could "escape" to.

-John

Agreed.

However, I will make a prediction for tomorrow: the third and final part of this series will be posted. The second part was posted last Thursday.

-John

Thanks for the information, Greg.

Although I was heavily involved with international business when I worked for Landis & Gyr / Siemens (about 30 years), I try to restrict my posts to U.S. Energy and Environmental Issues, and most are about my home State (California).

-John