In 1907, Samuel Insull, who had been hired by Thomas Edison in 1880, made the bold move of linking electric service of 40 towns near Chicago. He combined the assets of those companies, established a few central stations and distributed electricity to all the communities within the coverage area. He took 40 struggling electricity systems and made one large company he called the Public Service Company of Northern Illinois, the first big utility company.
For a hundred or so years, despite some stumbles along the way, the model of a centralized electricity system held up fairly well. Insull and his colleagues were familiar with the concept of people generating power in their own homes, but they could not have predicted the modern boom of renewable energy bringing intermittency to the baseload generation from coal and natural gas fuel.
They also could not have predicted renewable energy assets in homes contributing to the grid’s power supply in a two-way exchange that could disrupt both the simple business model of a power provider and the physics of the grid.
So why are we still running the grid like it is the days of Insull and Edison? We run a grid that is mostly reactive, as if it were a centralized system, when we have the technology that can enable us to run the grid as a network of nodes that are full participants in the operation of the system.
Build an antifragile grid
The future grid will not serve us well if it is purely the digital version of a century-old system. I call the grid we should build the antifragile grid. A grid that learns from every asset, shock and disruption not just to survive but to strengthen the system.
