Electric grid

My colleagues and I have developed an artificial intelligence system that helps buildings shift their energy use to times when the electric grid is cleaner. I’m an engineer who studies and develops smart buildings. My lab created Merlin, which learns how people use energy in their homes and adjust energy controls like thermostats to meet their needs while at the same time minimizing the impact on the grid. The system can learn on one set of buildings and occupants and be used in buildings with different controls and energy use patterns. We dubbed it Merlin after King Arthur’s legendary magician to reflect the magical nature of the system: It automatically collects data on how people use energy in their homes and identifies opportunities to charge and discharge home battery storage. And it does so in a way that you always have power for whatever you need. So your air conditioning is always available, but at the same time it reduces the strain on the grid – for...

Preparing for Atlantic hurricane season is always a priority in the Caribbean, especially when forecasts project high numbers of storms, as they do for 2024. The region’s most devastating storm in recent years, Hurricane Maria, struck in September 2017 and inflicted unprecedented destruction on Puerto Rico, Dominica, St. Croix and other islands. Maria killed more than 3,000 people and caused about US$96 billion in damage. It devastated Puerto Rico’s electric power system, leaving 1.5 million customers in the dark for up to 328 days – the longest blackout in U.S. history. These outages had cascading impacts on other infrastructure, such as water and communications systems. Today, the Caribbean region is experiencing new climate-related challenges. Prolonged extreme heat and humid days are increasing because of the accelerated warming of ocean waters. In response to these increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, I teamed up with a dozen other resea...

Winter storms can easily become billion-dollar disasters as the snow piles up on interstates and collapses roofs and power lines. Yet, while canceled flights and business interruptions can’t be avoided, what turns a snowstorm into a disaster often can be. I have worked on engineering strategies to enhance disaster resilience for over three decades and recently wrote a book, “The Blessings of Disaster,” about the gambles humans take with disaster risk. Snowstorms stand out for how preventable much of the damage really is. Stay off the roads The easiest storm costs to avoid involve human behavior, including driving during snowstorms. Successfully plowing the snow off a highway requires repeated passes to prevent snow from accumulating to the point where it piles up faster than it can be removed. However, that simple concept breaks down when an accident blocks the lanes, and traffic – including commerce and emergency vehicles – grinds to a halt. W...

After nearly two decades of stagnation, U.S. electricity demand is surging, driven by growing numbers of electric cars, data centers and air conditioners in a warming climate. But traditional power plants that generate electricity from coal, natural gas or nuclear energy are retiring faster than new ones are being built in this country. Most new supply is coming from wind and solar farms, whose output varies with the weather. That’s left power companies seeking new ways to balance supply and demand. One option they’re turning to is virtual power plants. These aren’t massive facilities generating electricity at a single site. Rather, they are aggregations of electricity producers, consumers and storers – collectively known as distributed energy resources – that grid managers can call on as needed. Some of these sources, such as batteries, may deliver stored electric power. Others may be big electricity consumers, such as factories, whose owners ha...

Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertions and false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it. Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss clean energy policy during their presidential campaign debate on Sept. 10, 2024. Legislation and regulations Th...