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Pier LaFarge is the CEO of Sparkfund, a distributed energy resource company.
To meet the needs of a growing economy over the last century, U.S. utilities and regulators built the electric grid to peak — big enough to handle the highest demand for 50 to 100 hours of the year. In many ways, it was a historic infrastructure success: The U.S. electric grid has the cheapest, most abundant power anywhere on Earth. It is on just about 100% of the time, and in many states, it costs less than 3% or 4% of GDP while providing the foundation for the rest of the economy. There are few public-purpose, highly-regulated institutions that can say the same in terms of the scale and economic value of their delivered results.
Pier LeFarge
But today, load growth driven by advanced manufacturing, electric vehicles, cloud computing and new demand from AI means we need to grow the grid faster than we have in the last 100 years to support a modern economy. Rapid growth will put enormous pressure on rates, and utilities will need to pick up new tools to turn the affordability challenge into an economic opportunity so folks aren’t choosing between groceries and power bills.
