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

The U.S. Has Billions for Wind and Solar Projects. Good Luck Plugging Them In.

Courtesy of the New York Times, a look at how the explosion in proposed clean energy ventures has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses: Plans to install 3,000 acres of solar panels in Kentucky and Virginia are delayed for years. Wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota have been abruptly […]

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Plan to Build More Solar Faces a Familiar Constraint: The Need for More Power Lines

Via Inside Climate News, a report on how California could embrace “policy synergy” to deploy solar in areas transitioning out of agriculture, but the transmission lines must come first: California’s San Joaquin Valley, a strip of land between the Diablo Range and the Sierra Nevada, accounts for a significant portion of the state’s crop production […]

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The iPhone: Staging A Quiet Revolution In How We Charge Our Devices

Via The Washington Post, a report on Apple’s Clean Energy Charging feature: Apple is getting a lot of flak for setting up iPhones to charge when the sun shines or the wind blows. The feature, called “Clean Energy Charging,” incited a tiny but vehement Twitter rebellion as critics, many of them right-wing personalities, slammed it as yet […]

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Staying Big or Getting Smaller: Energy Systems In Transition

Via Energy Atlas, an interesting graphic that look at the transformation occurring in much of the world’s energy systems. What we are seeing is a much more consumer-centric model emerging with much more diversity in terms of generation and consumption. This graphic provides a simplified yet useful way to visualise this trend. From centralised to […]

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Sun Cable To Power Cross-Border Grid Integration Project

Via Asian Power, a look at the Sun Cable cross-border grid integration project: Its project aims to deliver renewable energy from Australia to Singapore. Developing a solar energy network comes with its set of challenges, particularly when the goal is to create the world’s largest. In January 2023, Singapore energy firm Sun Cable made the […]

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Virtual Power Plants: Efficiently Networked Households Won’t Need New Generation

Via EnergyPost, an article on virtual power plants and why efficiently networked households won’t need new expensive generation: Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are the next new innovation that can change the landscape of the global energy transition in our favour, cheaply and fast, explain Liza Martin and Kevin Brehm at RMI. Essentially, they link and aggregate hundreds of thousands of […]

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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.