Sustainability

“Defining enduring infrastructure for a new age of electricity with constantly evolving technologies”

For the last 75 years, the AC grid has remained king, often being called “the greatest and largest machine in the world.” While the grid was being built-out over the past century, America’s pioneering grid operators have developed sophisticated systems to try to ensure they could meet customers’ demands in real-time — every second of every day. For most Americans, this meant they didn’t have to worry about where, when and how they got electricity.

However, the electronic age, coupled with increasing electrification of almost everything, and with an aging-out of older electricity generation facilities, there’s never been greater pressure on the grid’s capacity and future capability. And while the grid grew up on cheap and readily available fuel supplies, its over dependency on fossil fuels has increasing come into question in both environmental as well as economic terms.

So our electric system increasingly fails to meet the challenges of being sustainable: affordable, environmentally compatible, and socially supportive. To meet these criteria, new power system solutions need to:

• Significantly reduce their negative impact on the environment
• Be affordable for developing as well as advanced economies
• Make best use of existing infrastructure investments and valued assets
• Accommodate legacy, current and future technologies and equipment
• Support the growing social dependence on the surety of electricity

EMerge undertakes the creation of basic standards and guidelines that embrace these criteria. Each of our technical committees are formally chartered with the prerequisite of satisfying these common goals.