Driven by cost reductions, government incentives, and rising interest in replacing fossil-fuel sources of energy, the global market for distributed electricity generation is expanding at a rapid pace.
One of the most important trends in the energy industry today, the dramatic growth of DG is threatening utility business models and giving customers new levels of control over the energy they consume.
According to a recent report from Navigant Research, the worldwide installed capacity of distributed generation is expected to more than double in the next 9 years, growing from 87,300 megawatts annually in 2014 to more than 165,000 megawatts in 2023.
"Utilities in Western Europe are losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization as DG reaches higher levels of penetration in leading countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy," says Dexter Gauntlett, senior research analyst with Navigant Research. "The prospect of similar losses by utilities in the United States is prompting a struggle among utilities, the DG industry, and regulators over the future of DG models."
Modular distributed assets can adapt to a variety of different applications, each of which comes with different technical requirements, according to the report. Increasingly, DG systems must be able to communicate with not only the utility grid, but also other DG assets – particularly when deployed within microgrids.
