Residential solar panels and battery backups are becoming more and more popular as efficiency rises and costs sink. This explosion in distributed solar makes a new idea possible: virtual power plants, or a smart network of individual solar panels that can act like a big power plant when electricity is needed most. And as extreme weather threatens many communities, this idea is arriving in the nick of time.
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An abundance of fossil fuels combined with advances in technology to harness wind and solar power has sent energy prices crashing around the world. WSJ explains how it all happened at once.
Photo illustration: Carlos Waters/WSJ
Watch a Q&A with Steven Chu, who’s devoted a large part of his scientific career to searching for solutions to our climate challenges.
Steven Chu born February 28, 1948) is an American physicist and a former government official. He is known for his research at the University of California at Berkeley and his research at Bell Labs and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Chu served as the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Chu resigned as energy secretary on April 22, 2013. He returned to Stanford as Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology.
Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. He has conceived of a global “glucose economy”, a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today. On February 22, 2019, Chu began a one-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bio from Wikipedia
From a Wall Street Journal online article (Feb 13, 2020):
To meet the surge in demand projected by 2050, innovative engineers, utility operators and grid architects are planning for a future that blurs the distinctions between energy consumers and producers. Homeowners, businesses and other traditional utility customers are beginning to take on a new role as energy producers, through small-scale solar arrays, wind turbines and other new affordable technologies.
To coordinate so many different power sources and demands, the future power grid will depend on artificial intelligence, automated two-way communications and computer control systems to continuously collect and synthesize data from millions of smart sensors.
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