LET’S IMAGINE AN ELECTRIC GRID THAT TRULY MEETS THE MOMENT

As I watch the events unfolding this week in Texas, I’ve been inundated with calls and texts from friends from around the country wanting to hear my take on it. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been building a cleantech startup, Quioveo Energy, that focuses squarely on leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence at the intersection of the US electric grid, climate change, sustainable energy and disinvested communities.

I grew up in a community directly impacted by rising sea levels and the harmful effects of local fossil fuel extraction, while also only having intermittent access to energy as we went about our daily lives. I see and feel viscerally the imperative for us to transform the US energy economy.

For me, watching what is unfolding in Texas and surrounding states is not an intriguing topic to ponder, nor a passing news cycle event.

Over the weeks, months and years to come, a detailed autopsy of the recent events will be revealed by experts on the ground. And yet there are even now some critical lessons all of us can learn from what is happening. We are standing at an inflection point, a moment when more of us begin to pay attention to what truly matters and will make a difference for generations to come.

We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the noise. Years of experience and targeted study on the gaps and needs of our nation’s electric grid illuminate for me that there are three pieces to the Texas energy grid situation that are most worthy of our attention and focus. Let’s connect the dots.

ANTIQUATED GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

The electric grid situation in Texas is laying bare a problem that currently exists not just in Texas, but across the United States.

We are seeing the result of what happens when infrastructure that was designed and built over 100 years ago cannot keep up with the compounding realities of today.

A few examples of these compounding realities we see here are:

• extreme weather events
• energy infrastructure architecture in need of modernization
• a collective failure to incorporate new energy technologies into the grid at utility scale
• bureaucratic and centralized energy architecture
• a built-in disincentive for the producers and operators of the grid to nimbly adapt to quickly changing realities. In our current grid paradigm the premium has been to deliver reliability at all costs, resulting in a status quo rather than proactively adaptive.

What if instead, the US had:

• a grid infrastructure that was nimble and agile
• a grid that took into account what we know about our era of climate change
• a regulatory system that incentivized grid operators to adapt to the realities staring us in the face
• an electric grid system that also aggregates smaller, distributed pieces who can both toggle between working as a whole and de-linking to work independently when needed

Imagine a US electric grid system where sustainable, resilient and affordable energy flowed effortlessly inside our electric infrastructure. Each and every day, I imagine this electric grid system and design my life’s work around making it a reality.

OUR ENERGY SYSTEM & OUR PEOPLE ARE BOTH ‘WEAK LINK’ SYSTEMS

In studying soccer, two economists Chris Anderson and David Sally revealed in numbers a bigger truths beyond soccer and beyond sports — the concept of weak and strong link systems. Strong link systems are those that in order to improve them, you invest in and strengthen the strongest part of the system. Weak link systems, like a soccer team, are fortified when you strengthen the most fragile link on the chain.

What we at Quioveo have come to realize is that our electric grid, and the society that uses it, are both weak link systems. For our nation to make our electric grid stronger, it behooves us to prioritize investing in the weakest parts of both of these systems.

In the United States, given our nation’s history, the communities that are most vulnerable are usually our Black and Brown communities. We are seeing this right now in Texas. These communities, these links in our social system, are the ones that time and again suffer the worst when parts of the electric grid fail. And these failures will only continue in the near term.

WE SAW THIS COMING

Don’t be fooled — this event was entirely predictable.

The fall out from this event was also entirely predictable.

We knew it was coming.

And guess what? We know it will keep coming, albeit in different manifestations.

For those of us who work on this issue day in and day out, what is most disheartening is to know that we knew it was coming.

On the other hand, what is most heartening is the possibility that now more of us will pay attention to these dots that are now connecting clearly: extreme weather events, aging energy infrastructure, inequitable impacts of the worst effects of these events, and a society that increasingly depends on electricity and the internet for so much of our daily functions.

Even in the midst of a global pandemic, we know that the greater challenge in front of us is climate change. We are in the era of climate change, which is manifesting in extreme weather events. It is exacerbated by an economy that still runs primarily on fossil fuels.

What we at Quioveo are truly excited about, even in the midst of these compounding real human and systemic challenges, is that now is the time for imagination. Now is the time for courage. The opportunities for innovation within the US electric system are enormous. The dots are connecting right in front of our eyes. It is time to get working on building a new energy paradigm.

Leo Alicante is the founder of Quioveo (Key-oh-vey-oh) Energy. The purpose of Quioveo is to both accelerate the widespread adoption of sustainable, renewable energy and design a more robust electrical grid, with a suite of products and technologies that will allow electricity from exclusively sustainable sources to flow more efficiently and affordably than ever before. Follow us on Twitter & Instagram @quioveo and www.quioveo.com