This year, the fragility of the United States’ outdated electrical grid put a strain on the country like never before. In August, Category 4 hurricane Ida slammed the Gulf Coast, knocking out power to more than a million homes and businesses, many of which were without electricity for weeks. In July, an Oregon wildfire prompted California officials to warn of massive rolling blackouts, while other western states switched off electricity to prevent power lines from sparking more fires. And in February, Texas endured one of the costliest winter storms ever recorded in the U.S., with the state’s suppliers unable to handle the sudden energy demands of residents needing to heat their homes, resulting in blackouts to protect total collapse—a disaster scenario that could have left much of the state without power for months.
“It was brutal,” says Michael Bates, Intel’s general manager of energy, who lives near Austin. “My mom was parked in front of her fireplace for a week like a pioneer woman. It’s crazy to think something like that could happen today.”
Yet, in the wake of these crises, hope has emerged. The disasters spurred an overdue conversation about the nation’s century-old electrical grid. Today, it operates as a one-way system. Electricity flows from a few production sources, such as nuclear or coal plants, to individual homes and businesses. The design is antiquated and, because of ever more volatile weather patterns, increasingly precarious.
There is a better way: the smart grid, powered by Intel technologies, and scaled up through its long list of global partners. By enabling power to flow both ways—to and from any source, whether that’s a nuclear facility or a rooftop solar panel—a smart grid is a more equitable, renewable, and resilient solution to meet America’s energy needs in the 21st century. It will also be a crucial part of the White House’s recently stated goal of sourcing 45 percent of the nation’s energy from solar power by 2050.
“The Texas storm was deadly,” says Bates. “The good news is we have the technology to help ensure something like that doesn’t happen again. We just need to implement it.”
A Day in the Life of a Smart Grid
When we wake up the morning after implementing the smart grid, our light switches will look the same, but everything that happens after we flip them will be different.
Take power sources. Currently, electricity in the U.S. is generated by large, centralized, always-on energy sources. A smart grid powered by renewable micro-producers, however, can provide real-time two-way flows, with technology and applications enabling automated communication between utilities and their customers. This means power can come from just about anywhere—including an electric vehicle (EV) in a garage—and be transmitted wherever it’s needed. So if the main power source becomes unavailable, houses or businesses with solar arrays or stored electricity in their EVs or batteries can make up for it.
“If you move from a centralized power-generation system to one that’s distributed across the grid, closer to the point of consumption, the system is much more flexible and resilient,” says Bates. “To do that doesn’t require a wholesale revamp—you only need to update the substations that distribute electricity. Intel technology powers a system like this by enabling AI-powered computing at the edge of the grid, in every corner.”
In practical terms, this means that every home, car, and business can serve as power-generation sources—and make money doing so.
Imagine, for example, coming home after work to discover that the solar panels on your roof have made you extra income that day. With a smart grid, the unused energy created while you’re gone is shifted over to the grid, where it’s sold at the highest rate, and the money deposited into an account via a smart meter in your home.
Or envision parking your electric car in the lot at a grocery store. On the roof of the building are solar panels and a small wind turbine. Beneath the lot is a wireless, fast-charging EV station. While you’re picking up groceries, your car is automatically charged for free, as a perk of having an EV and shopping at the store. Then, at night, the store earns extra income by selling energy produced by the turbine back to the utilities, where their customers use it to watch TV or email.
These two scenarios are just the beginning of what our smart-grid future might look like.
Creating New Markets for Energy
Intel’s FPGAs are already powering some of the EV charging stations on the market. Encouraging widespread adoption of these stations, at national retailers and grocery stores, for example, could dramatically boost renewable energy throughout the grid. Customers could easily charge their electric cars at solar-powered charging stations, making EVs more appealing; wider availability could also help spur a transition to smart-grid technology, since the extra solar energy produced at those locations could easily be directed onto the grid.
In the future, democratizing the grid—enabling anyone to generate power and sell it at market rate—will make for a more resilient electrical supply when extreme weather happens. The idea is to make everyone a potential producer.
“Just think about how the Texas storm would have been different with a higher penetration of electric vehicles,” says Bates. “Those vehicles would be parked in garages, and you couldn't take them anywhere even if you wanted to, because of the snow. But with a smart grid and 500,000 EV batteries connected to it, we could help fill the need for electricity during the worst of the outage. Intel’s technology, with AI-enabled computing powers, flattens the grid to make this possible. It’s game changing.”
Designing a Renewable World
The smart-grid future is not as far off as it may seem.
In Europe, for instance, Intel is already partnering with some of the continent’s largest utilities to update substations and create a bidirectional grid system. The technology is referred to as virtualization—dividing hardware into multiple virtual computers that monitor, control, and perform edge analytics. The system can balance electricity loads as they enter the grid and then send them where they’re needed, creating a more resilient infrastructure. It can also respond to the market in real time, offering customers the lowest rate or allowing providers to sell at a specific price.
To achieve this kind of system in the U.S., two main hurdles remain—convincing existing energy providers and local governments, which heavily regulate grids, to invest in the upgrades. “It's not a technology issue,” says Bates, “it's an integration of technology issue.”
Yet the future is looking brighter. As Intel’s success in Europe demonstrates, a smart grid is not only possible, but it’s practical too, since it’s more dependable, adaptable, and efficient. Those attributes are increasingly critical as climate change makes extreme weather events like supercharged hurricanes and wildfires more common. Also, as previously mentioned, grid modernization may be the only way the U.S. can achieve the White House’s new goal of creating a carbon-free power sector by 2035 and producing enough solar energy to meet nearly half the nation’s energy needs by 2050. The rush is on to transition, and there are real consequences on the line. If we don’t innovate for cleaner energy sources quickly, a recent U.N. report suggests that the earth could warm by as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century—a catastrophic scenario.
“Now more than ever, we need to flatten the arc of the impacts of climate change,” Bates says. “We need to bring on more renewables, and we need to do it as fast as we can. There’s no doubt in my mind that tech solutions like smart grids are the quickest way to get us there.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Intel.
