A smart grid is a transactive grid.
- Lynne Kiesling
Author Archive

Why One Developer Won’t Quit Fighting To Connect America’s Grids

Via MIT Technology Review, an article on efforts to connect the U.S.’s grids: Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the Houston-based energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest, delivering clean electricity […]

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What Happens When A Concrete Jungle Becomes A ‘Sponge City’

Via High Country News, a look at how engineering for flood resilience can address storms heightened by climate change. The living roof of the H2 Hotel in Healdsburg, California, both cools the building and mitigates rainwater runoff.John D. Ivanko/Alamy Stock Photo In early February, meteorologists warned Southern Californians that a supercharged storm was headed their way, […]

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Grid-Scale Batteries: Clean Energy’s Next Trillion-Dollar Business

Via The Economist, a report on grid-scale batteries: Decarbonising the world’s electricity supply will take more than solar panels and wind turbines, which rely on sunshine and a steady breeze to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it about. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an […]

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Using Market Power To Save Great Salt Lake

Via PERC, a look at how water markets could be utilized to help rescue Great Salt Lake:   When the sculptor Robert Smithson began laying down rocks at a place called Rozel Point, a nub of shoreline encircling the Great Salt Lake, he had no idea that one day his twisting, turning creation called Spiral […]

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AI and Other Tricks Are Bringing Power Lines Into The 21st Century

Via The Economist, a look at how power grids are at last becoming smarter and more efficient: The rise of artificial-intelligence (ai) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, ai can also give a fair bit back, by helping transform ancient, overloaded and dumb […]

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Surging Power Demand Spurs Smarter Electric Grid Use

Via Cipher News, a look at how surging power demand is spurring smarter electric grid use Demand for electricity is shooting up in the United States following two decades of relatively flat electricity use — and yet building more transmission lines to bring new sources of energy online is a slow, bureaucratic process. This tension is pushing the power […]

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About This Blog And Its Authors
Grid Unlocked is powered by two eco-preneurs who analyze and reference articles, reports, and interviews that can help unlock the nascent, complex and expanding linkages between smart meters, smart grids, and above all: smart markets.

Based on decades of experience and interest in conservation, Monty Simus believes that a truly “smart” grid must be a “transactive” grid, unshackled from its current status as a so-called “natural monopoly.”

In short, an unlocked grid must adopt and harness the power of markets to incentivize individual users, linked to each other on a large scale, who change consumptive behavior in creative ways that drive efficiency and bring equity to use of the planet's finite and increasingly scarce resources.