Plausible Futures for Electric Grid Architecture

Electric power grids have become a critical national infrastructure, and will likely remain so for a long time. Having changed only incrementally from the 1890s, when Tesla's AC systems prevailed over Edison's DC system, transmission and distribution (T&D) architecture could continue to evolve in its own image, perhaps just getting bigger and smarter. However, several policy, market and technology drivers plausibly could create forces within the next century that would dramatically change the form T&D eventually takes. This effort uses a scenario planning process to examine some of these drivers and speculate how they might result in one of a number plausible but dramatically altered future T&D architectures.

Speaker: Merwin Brown, CIEE

Part of the Spring 2011 i4Energy Seminar Series. Live broadcast at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast; Questions can be sent via Yahoo IM to username: citrisevents. The schedule for the spring i4energy series is at http://www.citris-uc.org/events/i4energy-spring2011.