IEEE (PI)² Austin – (PES, PELS, IES, IAS, and PSES)

Policy efforts have focused for years on stimulating various forms of generation, both utility scale and customer-sited, distributed energy resources. It has been used to stimulate greater efficiency in energy use behind the meter or create load flexibility. Transmission and distribution infrastructure has been the area receiving the least attention…until recently.  It has become clear to elected and industry leaders that the grid itself is now, or will soon become, the bottleneck, for energy expansion, for electrification, for advancements in AI, for addressing climate change, even for economic development and competitiveness generally.  Huge commitments to new system upgrades and expansions are being made across the country, FERC and State PUCs are pressing for more forward-looking planning.  Help is on the way. But the transmission and distribution system are unlikely to catch up to the demand for delivery services for a variety of reasons, including resource constraints, planning and regulatory approval time-frames, and the growing difficulty of, and opposition to, siting of new lines by growing populations.  In the next few years transmission and distribution operations will turn increasingly toward the application for electric delivery of improvements in super-fast computing, in combination with machine learning, and real-time communications and controls, as well as expanding streams of data from outside, non-utility sources. This talk will focus on a discussion of how innovation will bridge the gap to the future grid, and, become intimately intertwined with its evolution.  Field experience will be shared from early commercial deployments.