The McDonnell Group

Utilities across the U.S. will adjust to this summer’s heat by bringing additional peaking capacity online with an assist from demand side reduction programs.  In Japan, fossil fuel plants, load shifting and conservation will be filling in the gap left by its nuclear capacity as the country’s last plant was taken off line on May 5.
 
In both cases, existing resources will be employed to cope with severe conditions at a sizeable cost.  It would be interesting to see the difference made by largely untapped distributed energy resources, or DG, in either situation under a microgrid structure for intelligent, localized power delivery.