Bruce Nordman of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) spoke to the Energy Changemakers Community Sept. 18, 2024, about putting the customer first through a unified theory of grid coordination.
Nordman described a reimagined, customer-centric electric grid, much like the Internet where “simple and universal” technologies work the same everywhere.
“We should look to the success of Internet architecture, which has transformed our communication systems over the last 50 years, revolutionized them, and, critically, made them much better than they used to be,” he told the 50 participants in the live stream discussion.
“In order to create Internet technology, we didn’t modify the phone system. We had to throw away a whole lot of the assumptions about how it works and replace them with something better,” he said.
His approach does away with existing retail electricity pricing mechanisms and instead creates automated, dynamic pricing with capacity subscriptions.
An abbreviated version of the live stream is available on YouTube. The full one-hour discussion, including Q&A with the audience, is available to premium members of the Energy Changemakers Community.