Intelligent Electrification as an Enabler of Clean Energy and Decarbonization

Purpose of Review Electrification efforts will change electric demand patterns, but must be made beneficial to the deployment of renewable generation. To ensure this, we need intelligent coordination of millions of resulting distributed energy resources (DERs). We provide an overview of challenges and opportunities associated with intelligent electrification as a means to enable decarbonization and clean energy. Summary Intelligent electrification can bring value to the grid and consumers, but depends on its implementation and cyber-physical coordination architecture to manage consumer quality of service (QoS), grid services, and grid reliability. We also review and discuss challenges with getting intelligent electrification efforts to scale. Recent Findings We find that many methods already exist for coordinating DERs to deliver valuable grid services, but that practical implementation barriers exist regarding feedback control, integrating grid data, and deploying intelligent electrification at scale. In addition, accurately characterizing and maximizing the available flexibility of a fleet of DERs is an open technical problem.