The deployment of communication networks, distributed energy generation and advanced power control/management solutions throughout utility networks will effect significant change on grid operations and usage of electricity into the future. This increasing ability to actively control loads will help to address the key challenge of management capacity – balancing consumption and generation. Increased deployment of energy storage devices in the distribution grid will help make this process happen more effectively and improve system performance Many others within the industry agree.

John Knott, President of JD Technologies, LLC recently posted to LinkedIn: Energy (Energy Industry Expertise) and what resulted was an excellent exchange of thoughts and ideas so much so that we wanted to offer the following highlights and keep the conversation going:

• Abundance of major player entrants in early 2015 would assist in driving down the costs, accelerate R&D and enable companies to benefit from a more attractive ROI.
• Research most recently is moving into smaller systems in the kilowatt range, aimed at small business/homer owners as viable alternatives to the old environmentally laden products the still maintain the majority of the market share worldwide.
• Improving on energy density performance is the key pathway in lowering costs.
• With such diverse size & backup requirements (from 1 KW to hundreds of MW and from a few minutes to several days), there will be dozens of technologies and thousands of companies participating in tens of trillions of dollars of annual revenue worldwide.
• We need battery storage and it adds tremendous value in the distributed generation/storage/resiliency mix even at today’s relatively high cost.
• The size of storage; i.e. 40KW to 1MW is becoming necessary for renewable applications.