Girding the Grid for Renewables

Economic cycles wax and wane, rebates and tariffs come and go, but guided by clear heads and pure hearts (not to mention lured by the prospect of future profits), technology-driven innovators march on.

These two indicators indicate that the grid's going to have a lot more renewables to manage in coming years:

• SmartGridNews on the UN's global renewables forecast
• Greentech Media solar sales update and forecast

So we'd better keep building out the new grid so it can handle all of this intermittency, right? Storage technology will play a key role and needs to get a lot better than it is today.

And we also might want to make the entire thing secure while we're at it. Banks can (and now, quite frequently, do) refund fraudulent charges made to your hijacked accounts, but it's not clear how utilities will make businesses or homeowners whole when cyber attacks disrupt power delivery.

Photo credit: Jumanji Solar on Flickr.com