Both of the partners at Emergent Research started their careers as economists, specifically energy economists.
So we've followed the Texas power outages and think just as the pandemic has accelerated digitalization and remote work trends, the Texas outage has accelerated existing trends driving the growth of microgrids and distributed power.
Microgrids are localized power generation grids that can disconnect from the traditional grid and operate autonomously.
Natural gas, propane and gasoline powered backup generators are good examples.
Less common but growing rapidly in number are solar panels connected to batteries.
Microgrids are common at universities, hospitals and businesses - and are becoming popular with homeowners.
Bloomberg's How the Rich Can Escape America's Unreliable Power Grid points out that PG&E, northern California's main electricity provider:
"... has more than half a million residential solar customers, and at least 18,000 have installed battery energy storage systems. You hear a lot in California about “solar plus storage”: solar panels to harvest sunlight into electricity, paired with a home battery that can store the electricity for later use, like after the sun goes down."
Californians are turning to solar for a variety of reasons (environmental concerns, to save money), but a growing reason is the rolling blackouts that have become increasingly common during fire season, which now occurs regularly in the fall.
As the Bloomberg article title implies, going the full solar route is still a bit expensive.
But solar power costs continue to fall, and Texas and California's power failures show that big, highly connected, and complex power systems - which are very efficient when they work - are also prone to very big failures.
And, as climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heatwaves, wildfires and other extreme events, there will be more power disruptions and failures.
This will lead to increasing demand for microgrids and other forms of distributed power.
Which, as we've pointed out in the past, will create new opportunities for small businesses.
