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Microgrids Will Be a $13 Billion Industry in Five Years

The age of tiny power is nigh.
A microgrid, ready for boom-time. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Remember how home solar panels and small wind turbines are kind of like the 1996-era internet? How what we call distributed generation (DG)—hyper-local power production as opposed to giant-ass coal and nuke plants—is on the verge of getting hacked and innovated and taking off in a big way? Well, there's some more evidence that the boom is nigh: "microgrid enabling technologies," the tech that allows you to sustain your own personal or community-sized power grid and ditch the central juicer, will be a $12.7 billion industry in 2018.

Which isn't particularly surprising. Germany, you know, is already off and running here—over the last few years it has traded in its big old nuclear power plants for thousands of solar installations. The majority of those are on rooftops, and provide democratized power to small communities and homeowners.

But Pike Research has released a new report that shows that within five years, the microgrid industry will truly be booming. Sales of advanced energy storage technology, electric vehicle charging stations, and other tech that enables consumers to better manage and benefit from their own power supply will be rising. Most of all, though, the boom will be felt in the tech that allows people to harness their own power in the first place:

By far the largest investments in microgrid enabling technologies are in different forms of [distributed generation], including [combined heat and power systems], fuel cells, solar PV, and different forms of distributed wind. Combined, these four technologies will total more than 3,978 megawatts (MW) of new generation capacity valued at more than $12.7 billion in vendor revenues in 2018.

In other words, super-local power setups long-derided as 'off the grid' and hippieish will soon comprise a massive global market. They now signal the future of keeping the lights on: more nimble, more democratic, less beholden to monolithic, fossil fuel-burning utilities. Plus, as residents of the globally-warmed world see the folly of relying on vulnerable, patchwork central grids, many will switch to safer, local systems powered by wind and solar. And again, as we're able to better monitor, better regulate, and better distribute our own power, new innovations in the arena will spring forward.

More efficient ways to store juice, wind turbines better suited for smaller dwellings, microgrid tech that will better manage supply and demand on a community-level. That's the kind of stuff we'll likely be seeing soon, as microgrids continue to take off. Reports like this one are provign that distributed generation is far from a pipe dream—it's the foundational of how we'll power our societies when we finally get the sense to shut out fossil fuels. Also, apparently, it's going to make some investors quite rich.