Brooklyn Program a Leader in 'Microgrid' Electricity Generation

"In a promising experiment in an affluent swath of [Brooklyn], dozens of solar-panel arrays spread across rowhouse rooftops are wired into a growing network," writes Diane Cardwell. "Called the Brooklyn Microgrid, the project is signing up residents and businesses to a virtual trading platform that will allow solar-energy producers to sell excess-electricity credits from their systems to buyers in the group, who may live as close as next door."

So far, Brooklyn Microgrid has 50 participants—so there's a lot of room left to grow. The microgrid concept, like this case study of its application, is still nascent, but with a long-touted ability to disrupt the energy market.

"The ability to complete secure transactions and create a business based on energy sharing would allow participants to bypass the electric company energy supply and ultimately build a microgrid with energy generation and storage components that could function on their own, even during broad power failures," writes Cardwell. Cardwell looks beyond Brooklyn for other examples of distributed energy generation, finding leading-edge technologies and systems already at work in places like Australia, Germany, and Bangladesh. Planetizen covered a microgrid case study in Santa Monica, California in 2016.

Cardwell also includes a lot of details about the state initiatives that allowed the creation of the Brooklyn Microgrid program.