From OilPrice, May 31:
- Power grids are rapidly decentralizing, requiring a shift from centralized hubs to grid edge management for stability and responsiveness.
- Artificial intelligence at the grid edge is critical for managing increased energy demands, two-way energy flows, and vulnerabilities in aging grid systems.
- Modernizing the grid with intelligent computing and cutting-edge technologies is essential for handling variable energies, reducing outages, and ensuring energy security.
Power grids around the world are decentralizing at a rapid pace as renewable energy production vastly reshapes where electricity is produced. This will require a massive systems overhaul in the way that our power grids are designed, maintained, and protected. Instead of maintaining grid management at a central hub, more and more software and hardware developments are taking place at the grid edge.
According to Wood Macenzie, ‘grid edge’ is “an umbrella term to cover all the distributed hardware, software and business innovations that exist in proximity to the end user, rather than at the centre of a traditional generation network.” Industry experts contend that moving grid intelligence away from central hubs and toward the grid edge is a necessity to adapt and respond to what Greentech Media calls the “undeniable fact that we are moving from a centralized energy system to a next-generation distributed energy system.”
Infrastructure doesn’t only need to move to the edge to keep grids stable, it needs to get much more intelligent too. Demands on our power grid are majorly ramping up with the additional power demand from electric vehicles and data centers, and becoming more complicated thanks to new two-way flows of energy. Historically, energy flowed from utilities to end-users on demand. But now, residential solar panels have turned many consumers into producer-consumers, with two-way energy flows to the grid. What’s more, renewable resources produce energy when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, not in response to consumer demand. All of this adds up to significant vulnerabilities in our aging grid system....
....MUCH MORE
Cascading failures have happened in systems as diverse as finance and ecosystems (Wiki).
Here are some of the big cascading grid failures:
Cascading failure caused the following power outages:
- Blackout in Northeast America in 1965
- Blackout in Southern Brazil in 1999
- Blackout in Northeast America in 2003
- Blackout in Italy in 2003
- Blackout in London in 2003
- European Blackout in 2006
- Blackout in Northern India in 2012
- Blackout in South Australia in 2016
- Blackout in southeast South America in 2019
- Blackout in Chile in 2025
- Blackout in Spain, Portugal and France in 2025
The 2003 U.S. - Canada blackout affected over 50 million people. If interested see Practical Engineering, February 15, 2022:
What Really Happened During the 2003 Blackout?
