Who Won the U.S. Presidential Debate?

The grid needs to change. To electrify everything from vehicles to heating systems to stovetops, the U.S. grid must expand by about 57% and get more flexible, too. Solar and wind energy are the renewables most likely to dominate a future clean energy grid. But they are found primarily in remote areas, far from the hubs that need their power.

And that is a problem. Today's transmission system simply is not designed to ingest all that remote power. Bursts of power on an especially sunny day in the desert could cause grid faults—little blips that can propagate and cause outages—or overload power lines.

But what if we could better control where and how solar energy—or all our energy—flows within the distribution system so we can balance out all that power? That is what a team of experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Florida State University, and Ohio State University are working to do.

Over the last four years, the team built a testbed to study and hone an entirely new kind of grid technology, one that could help grid operators better regulate how and where electricity flows. The device, called a back-to-back medium-voltage converter, could do that with a fraction of the weight and cost of the technology it could replace.

"This is a whole new type of equipment that opens up a whole new way for a utility to manage their distribution systems," said Barry Mather, a researcher at NREL. "Much higher levels of distributed energy resources could be put onto a circuit if you had this extra device within the system."

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