Residential Batteries Are Becoming An Active Grid Management Tool
Residential storage batteries are soaring in popularity in the US and other countries as their use in virtual power plants increases.
Smart Grid
InterSolar Europe 2026 Key Takeaways
The smarter E Europe 2026 happened this week in Munich, with the lead event of InterSolar Europe co-located with ess Europe, Power2Drive and EM-Power. Regardless of the intended organization of the conference and exhibitions, the lines between them have increasingly blurred, as solar is combined with storage, EV charging and … [continued]
A Volkswagen ID.7 connected to the Elli BiDi Charger: bidirectional charging integrates the vehicle battery into the energy system and can help reduce mobility costs. Copyright: Volkswagen AG.
Volkswagen Group & Elli Bring Vehicle-to-Grid Offer to the Volume Market!
Elli presents an integrated product package for bidirectional charging in Germany together with Volkswagen, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles and CUPRA at Power2Drive. The offer combines compatible electric vehicles, the Elli BiDi Charger, Volkswagen Naturstrom V2G Flow electricity tariff and the Elli BiDi App, enabling active participation in the energy market via … [continued]
Canada Needs A Second Golden Spike For Electricity
Canada’s federal government has finally put electricity where it belongs: at the centre of the national economy. That is the most important thing about Mark Carney’s newly announced National Electricity Strategy. This is not just a climate file. It is an industrial strategy, an affordability strategy, a trade strategy, a … [continued]
From Beacon to Amber, Flywheels Missed the Grid
Amber Kinetics crossing my screen today was a reminder that electricity markets are littered with technologies that never quite die. Flywheels are one of those ideas. They are mechanically elegant, grounded in physics everyone understands, and they solve a real problem in principle. Store energy in a spinning mass, pull … [continued]
Beyond Generation: The Grid Innovations Hawaiʻi Needs Next
Naturally, just when Hawaiʻi’s decarbonization pathway starts to look complete, another chapter occurs to me. After the generation mix, the island-by-island resource story, the transport implications, and the logic of electrification, what remains is the part of the energy transition that fossil systems used to provide almost by accident. Hawaiʻi … [continued]
Oʻahu 2050: A Hard-Charging Roadmap to a Zero-Carbon Energy System
What follows is a draft roadmap for a decarbonized O’ahu. This roadmap does not appear out of nowhere. It follows a long chain of analysis that rebuilt Oʻahu’s energy system piece by piece. Earlier articles stripped away overseas aviation fuel, international maritime bunkering, and military demand to isolate the island’s … [continued]
Chatgpt generated illustration showing how transmission buffering batteries store excess solar generation and release it later through the same transmission line.
Buffering Batteries: The Grid Enhancing Technology No One Calls A GET
Buffering batteries placed near transmission constraints are rarely listed among grid enhancing technologies. The usual list includes advanced conductors, dynamic line rating, and power flow control devices. All of those technologies increase the instantaneous capacity of transmission lines. Batteries do not do that. A battery cannot turn a 500 MW … [continued]
Chatgpt generated visualization showing how temperature, sunlight, and wind affect the thermal capacity of transmission lines.
Unlocking Existing Grid Capacity With Dynamic Line Rating
Dynamic line rating can produce large savings in some parts of the electricity system. In other cases it reveals that operators had been overestimating how much cooling transmission lines receive from the surrounding air. Both outcomes matter. Dynamic line rating replaces assumptions with measurements and forecasts about what transmission lines … [continued]
Chatgpt generated: Electric vehicle supplying power to a home in the evening using vehicle-to-home technology.
Demand Shifting in Hawaiʻi: The Other Half of the Energy Transition
The series examining Oʻahu’s energy transition has followed a consistent structure. It began by defining the island’s fully electrified energy system and stripping away energy uses that do not serve the civilian economy. Aviation fuel for flights leaving Hawaiʻi, maritime bunkering for ships crossing the Pacific, and military energy consumption … [continued]
