Massive investments to overhaul our aging power grid are underway, but it’s going to require significant planning to be successful.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg sits down with Ron Ambrosio, an energy transformation professional, to talk about getting smarter and more deliberate how we plan for the future.

“One of the key themes that we’re trying to educate the industry on is the importance of not just looking at forward incremental steps and design, but also the importance of looking at that endgame and doing analysis on that from an architectural perspective,” said Ambrosio.

“The endgame is reducing carbon fuels, trying to depend on renewable energy more and more and trying to expand to the use of distributed energy resources.”

Limits on the grid today are delaying the deployments of new grid assets. 

“That bottleneck partially reflects the fact that our current grid design does have limitations in what it can absorb today.” 

Ambrosio noted that, when it comes to planning, we will always have the issue needing new transmission.

“There’s a lot of evolution that the distribution systems need to go through in order to accommodate a very high penetration of more distributed renewable energy and other types of DER resources.” 

Ambrosio is former chief technology officer of smarter energy research at the IBM TJ Walton Research Center and former chairman of the Gridwise Architecture Council. He is a senior technical executive and scientist with a focus on technology, business and policy issues related to energy transformation in the electricity industry. He has 40 years of software engineering experience in distributed, real-time systems and their interoperability with enterprise computing environments, and 20 years of experience specifically in the energy transformation space.