Imagine a world in which the electricity system doesn’t work like it does today. In this world buildings also contribute to the grid with solar panels and fuel cells. Batteries can provide some grid-services, local backup and balancing. It’s more like Airbnb or other parts of the sharing economy. But electricity is a public infrastructure that needs to be fair and provide opportunity and security for everyone.
How can we model and design this world?
In my research I use the patterns and self-similarity of urban systems to create probable future scenarios with agent-based modeling that can compare costs and benefits of different design rules. See the summary article here on designing a probabilistic grid.
https://www.openabm.org/model/6006/version/1/view
The Scale of Smart?
A common (and very worthwhile) question that people ask is: what is the smart grid? There is no one answer to this, and most likely the smart grid will be organized and operated differently by differently by different people and places. This article gives an overview of my dissertation research on the ‘Scale of Smart’, in which I compare the effects of taking decision making at different scales.
Energy System Modularity and Co-production?
Madeline Tyson 