Beginnings of a Customer Facing Smart Grid
Meanwhile, utility customers are looking for and finding alternatives
to the legacy grid for any or all of several reasons: economy,
reliability, security, sustainability, independence, preference for
renewable energy, carbon mitigation, nuclear waste avoidance,
privacy, even novelty. In contrast to the legacy grid model, strong
new developments propel the industry toward a new reality:
Hundreds of thousands, eventually millions of small
distributed generators (e.g., conventional engines and
turbines, solar PV arrays, wind generators) and storage (e.g.,
electrical, thermal, mechanical) deployed at the distribution
edges of the grid,
Substantial changes in the nature of demand on the grid
caused in part by increasing deployment of customer owned
and controlled distributed generation that is not dispatchable
by the utility and may actually be as intermittent as the sun
and wind,