Featured Guest Article – Power Electronics is Coming Home

Storm Power Components is pleased to share this new Featured Guest Article from Gregory Smith, CEO of Flex Power.

The article, titled "Power Electronics is Coming Home", provides an excellent overview of the trend toward decentralization of the power grid that is being driven by the rise of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). These DERs include solar, battery energy storage systems (BESS), and connection of electronic vehicles (EVs) in homes.

Some of the key insights regarding DERs include:

• Benefits to stakeholders, such as consumers, utilities, EV manufacturers, and others
• Key requirements for success, such as real-time awareness, instantaneous communication, and controllability
• What is all this going to mean for the home?
• How DERs will drive changes in patterns of energy usage
• Data management implications

Within this context, the article then provides a deep-dive into how new innovations in power electronics, such as "Smart Inverters" will be needed to enable real-time, comprehensive integration and management of these diverse DER resources - both within the home and across the grid.

According to the article, "The role that power electronics is going to play in this new interactive grid, is to enable controllability down to the building level, which we have never seen before. The ability to control and balance power at the lowest level will establish capabilities that will allow us to control the grid more effectively. This will enable power to be dispensed or absorbed at the nano level, making the end points of the grid active participants in its management."

Projected benefits include:

• Improved grid services and peak energy savings
• Better home resiliency such as eliminating the impacts of power outages
• Lower overall home energy costs.

For more information read the full article here.