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Distributed energy resources: Planning for the future

Nature Energy volume 2, Article number: 17129 (2017) Cite this article

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Distributed energy resources will play a fundamental role in providing low-carbon electricity in a smart, flexible way. A new study develops a cross-disciplinary planning tool showing that ‘going distributed’ always pays.

Energy systems are experiencing a profound transformation: some of the old paradigms are fading, and new emerging views need to be developed in order to face the challenges that climate change, resource scarcity, and urbanization are expected to pose in the next decades1,2. The need for electricity will increase at unprecedented rates, especially in developing countries, where megacities will play a primary role for the development of those regions3. In addition, in accordance with the Paris Climate agreement4, cities and their infrastructures are being called on to reduce their carbon footprint. The increasing share of distributed renewable energy (DER) sources will play a fundamental role in achieving that. Indeed, electricity infrastructures — for decades based on a rigid, fossil-fuel-based model of production and distribution — are already being replaced by a new, flexible model of generation and distribution based on renewables integration and decentralization. The emerging model of distributed generation5 is gaining growing attention in the literature, mainly thanks to an increasing level of digitalization of infrastructures. This allows for greater availability of data and provides unprecedented control of network stability, even in the case of intermittent disturbances and interaction with consumers. At the same time, consumers themselves are becoming interactive and will constitute an integral part of the electricity generation–distribution system, becoming what is now known as ‘prosumers’6 (both producers and consumers). Despite this progress, the combination of intangible factors (such as the impact of consumer behaviours), intermittency of supply, and the lack of adequate regulatory models able to accommodate this new paradigm limits the full development of distributed generation systems. Writing in Nature Energy, Jain and colleagues at Stanford University, USA, overcome these limitations by developing a decision support system that goes steps further in the direction of full deployment of DER by including socio-technical complexities in a cross-disciplinary framework model for distributed generation and infrastructure planning7.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMT-School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Piazza S. Francesco 19, Lucca, 55100, Italy

    Angelo Facchini

  2. NRC-Institute for Complex Systems Studies, Via dei Taurini 19, Rome, 00185, Italy

    Angelo Facchini

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  1. Angelo Facchini
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Correspondence to Angelo Facchini.

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Facchini, A. Distributed energy resources: Planning for the future. Nat Energy 2, 17129 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2017.129

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