Image credit: Lisa Martine Jenkins
Nicola Phillips is Latitude Media’s head of events.
The clean energy industry has been talking about the latent potential of distributed resources and demand-side management for two decades. The concept of the “grid edge” was coined in 2013. But during most of this period, load growth was flat, and utilities didn’t have an incentive to orchestrate distributed resources in lieu of building more or upgrading existing centralized generation.
This moment is different. As load growth surges and capacity constraints outrun sheer volume constraints, there is pressure for the first time to use these resources to their full potential, not just to manage peaks. It’s a disruption that raises a lot of important, and previously unexamined, questions about how this market scales.
That’s why Latitude Events is organizing Flex Summit, happening this October 14–15 in Austin. The two-day conference will map the path forward for grid flexibility and distributed capacity in the AI era.
