March 14: World Economic Forum has revealed that adoption of new “grid edge” technologies in OECD countries could bring more than $2.4 trillion of value creation for society and the industry over the next 10 years, by increasing the efficiency of the overall system, optimizing capital allocation and creating new services for customers. The Forum in its report ‘The Future of Electricity: New Technologies Transforming the Grid Edge’ published on March 10 revealed the fact.

According to the report, rapidly falling costs of grid edge technologies is fueling their adoption by customers. Smart meters, connected devices and grid sensors will increase the efficiency of network management.  More importantly, it allows customers to have real-time information about energy supply and demand across the system. The expected surge in adoption of electric vehicles could provide great flexibility to the grid in the shape of storage, but could also pose site congestion challenges, for example if a large number of electric vehicles wanted to recharge in a given geography at the same time.

For consumers, the roll-out of grid-edge technologies will enable customers to take the center stage of the electricity system. Under the right price signals and market design, customers will be able to produce their own electricity, store it and then consume it at a cheaper time or sell it back to the grid. Such a system will even allow peer-to-peer decentralized transactions.