Vital ‘R’ in Electricity: Why Resiliency Reigns and Offers Strongest Microgrid Value Proposition
What’s the biggest and most vital “R” in electricity service and delivery?
Rates? Certainly, that’s a big one, as utility customers struggle with costs associated with an increasingly beleaguered transmission grid system. Price signals matter but they fluctuate.
Renewables? Of course, wind and solar are a growing and essential part of the evolving generation mix. But decarbonization cannot rely on renewables alone. Natural gas, nuclear, and battery storage provide lower-emission alternatives to the historically coal-dominated utility resource portfolio of the past. Multiple pathways exist to help us move closer to net zero for the future.
Resiliency? Ding-ding-ding: There it is, the thing that matters most. Customers don’t like higher rates and may not care about diverse fuel mixes, but nothing riles them up like grid outages or load shedding.
Resiliency, that’s the trillion-dollar word in the energy transition. You can clean it up and mix it up, but don’t mess it up.
Utilities do an incredible job to bring electricity on a massive scale, but only a few years ago they were predicting flat load growth and now we see the data centers, industrial electrification and the race for artificial intelligence leadership pressuring the 20th century system more than ever.
Collaboration is key to make the grid edge strengthen the whole
Enter the microgrid and distributed energy resource (DER) solution.
“Microgrids and on-site power relieves a lot of businesses of having to have their business strategies and execution tied to how well the utility is going to treat them,” Adib Naslé, CEO of microgrid design and analytics modeling firm Xendee, said during an interview with Microgrid Knowledge at last week’s RE+ conference in Las Vegas.
“It’s one of those situations where there are a lot of wins in it for a lot of people,” Naslé noted about the prospect of on-site power directly supplying energy for business operations, whether its electric vehicle charging, manufacturing or AI computing. “The ship has sailed on distributed energy for electrification of industry or transportation.The business case is just too compelling, and the resiliency needs are inherent.”
Xendee recently announced its microgrid collaboration with energy management technology firm Eaton Corp. as RE+ was getting underway at the Venetian Resort and Caesar’s Forum. The partnership with Eaton will further empower Xendee in offering a full-suite solution for microgrids utilizing the company’s predictive control software and DER modeling, coupled with Eaton’s own control hardware and expertise.
The campaign to meet the so-called Industrial Compute Age is clearly centered around teamwork making the dream work. Eaton also recently announced a digitalization collaboration with Autodesk.
Eaton was also there at its RE+ booth last week joined by leadership both from Xendee and EV infrastructure partner Chargepoint.
“To really scale electrification, you need collaboration across industries,” Paul Ryan, vice president and general manager of energy transition at Eaton, told Microgrid Knowledge. “I don’t believe any company can do this on its own.”
Microgrid developers are recognizing that. Schneider Electric has created its EcoStruxure Microgrid Flex program to standardize and streamline project development, bringing in partners such as Sprocket Power, Pisgah Energy and Azzo.
Taking the direct current route to distributed energy resiliency
Data centers certainly are the game changer on a macro level, with some 100 or more GWs of additional capacity expected to come online in the U.S. alone by the early 2030s. But industrial and transportation electrification connected to co-located or on-site power is another spoke in the wheel to create greater resiliency durability at the edge of the grid, if not completely disconnected from the main grid.
Earlier this year, Eaton and EV charging solutions provider ChargePoint detailed the beginnings of their collaboration to unite both on-site power for charging infrastructure as well as intelligent, AI-ready power management.
Chargepoint has worked itself into position as an “end-to-end enabler” of the complete EV charging ecosystem. This will include direct-current (DC) charging and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) capabilities.
It makes sense on multiple levels, experts say. The points of distributed generation, such as solar and battery storage, are DC, while the points of use are also DC.
ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer said the discussions with Eaton on a better and more energy-efficient path forward to DC and V2X go back years and now aim forward by decades.
“We’re integrating charging in a more technologically advanced way with the grid and with vehicles, and by doing so we can unlock all kinds of value,” Wilmer said at RE+.
By shifting the charging dynamic from AC to DC and filling it with DC-DC, the power of a charging cabinet can be expanded beyond 1 MW.
“The amount of cars you can charge, in a limited footprint, goes way, way up,” Wilmer added. “You can save 30% on capital expenditures, reduce operational expenditures 30%. . . And in 30% less physical footprint.”
Once more fully realized on the ground, this could elevate the value argument for electrification with heavy-duty vehicle fleets as well as more long-distance drivers.
“That is what we believe is the game changer: Reducing operating costs and making it easier to install,” Eaton’s Ryan said.
“The customer should have a choice,” he added. “You can integrate the technology seamlessly in the home, vehicle and grid.”
All of this sounds great physically, but it doesn’t work without precise control aspects from the ones, zeros and AI. Digital tools will balance and direct the bi-directional flow, while microgrids can take the pressure off the utility substation down the road from the future EV charging park.
And that’s where AI collaborations between Eaton and partners such as Xendee and Autodesk connect present-day ideals with future project success. Next-gen communication is key to making it work in the brains of the controller system, telling the customer-facing muscles such as meters and charging modules exactly what to do and by precisely by how much.
Sustainable innovation to overcome political chaos
Predictive technology and predictable outcomes are what excite both investors and consumers.
“There is a science-based and reliable way to deliver on those benefits and to improve customer adoption and, at the same time, bring in bankability and finance-ability behind the projects,” Xendee CEO Naslé said. “Our focus is to go to market with power controller and intelligence layers.”
All of this comes during a time referred to at RE+ as “peak chaos.” Tariffs come in and out, up and down, while the One Big Beautiful Bill Act sunsets production and investment tax credits for many renewable energy projects of the future.
And yet optimism reigns and the sun shines like the big ball of nuclear fusion that it is.
Solar, for instance, is cheaper and quicker to build, while the nationally interconnected grid is amazing for what it does, but not nimble enough to do what it doesn’t: bringing specific power on-site for specific purposes such as high-level data computing, electrification and, bringing it all back home, resilience for any and all mission-critical needs.
Microgrids, DC and otherwise, can do that. The proof is at the edge.
“The distributed energy system inherently has resiliency,” Naslé said. “Just as computing went from the mainframes to distributed and personal computers and now, we have the internet.
“The same path will move forward with the electrical system,” he added. “The central system will always be there. Distributed energy is an architecture that includes scalability and resiliency.”
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About the Author
Rod Walton, Microgrid Knowledge Managing Editor
Managing Editor
For Microgrid Knowledge editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].
I’ve spent the last 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. I was an energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World before moving to business-to-business media at PennWell Publishing, which later became Clarion Events, where I covered the electric power industry. I joined Endeavor Business Media in November 2021 to help launch EnergyTech, one of the company’s newest media brands. I joined Microgrid Knowledge in July 2023.
I earned my Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. My career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World, all in Oklahoma . I have been married to Laura for the past 33-plus years and we have four children and one adorable granddaughter. We want the energy transition to make their lives better in the future.
Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech are focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.