How the Grid Is Helping Industries Shift to a More Powerful Energy Landscape

In a world that’s getting warmer, our chance of meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement looks increasingly uncertain, but grid transformation presents an opportunity to make up for lost time on the road to net zero.

“Time is really short and we need to drastically reduce carbon emissions in the next 10 years across all major emitters, including the industry and energy sectors,” says Liana Ault, Venture General Manager of Energy Innovation at Nokia.

Industries must take urgent action to decarbonize faster, she says—and grid transformation through digitalization is essential to achieve this acceleration.

As a first step, industries and enterprises must assess their capabilities and gather data to determine the actions they can take toward decarbonization. This data can be used to create simulations using digital twins and AI, for example. Technological innovations such as these help accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources and support electrification across industries. Ault adds that these tools can uncover cost savings and potential revenue sources that may be previously unrealized.

Newer grid network technology is enabling demand-side flexibility, improving grid health by supporting load shifting—moving energy consumption from one time period to another—and allowing new approaches to energy storage. This means that organizations are able to use energy more efficiently and save on energy costs. Vehicle-to-grid technology, where energy is pushed back to the power grid from EV batteries, is one potential example of efficient energy storage and use.

“Vehicle fleets are one of the first places where we really see examples of sustainable efficiencies, where grid solutions and networks help businesses and institutions,” says Peter Kelly-Detwiler, energy expert and strategic consultant.

He believes vehicle-to-grid is an inevitable solution because it involves so much electricity in batteries on wheels. “The economic momentum of the value of all that energy in those EVs cannot be ignored,” he says.

The ability to feed energy into the grid using these and other resources is also key for sustaining energy security and reliability.

Local generation is another growing trend supporting both cost optimization and new market participation. Industries are also looking for local energy sources so that they have resilient power, Ault says.

“Digitalization enables local energy generation to feed into the grid to balance and control local resources optimally,” she says. “Industries know they have a level of energy security and can inform customers about how much energy they use, enabling them to make decisions and act based on that knowledge.”

Breaking system operation of the grid into smaller regions, like municipalities or neighborhoods, which can maintain themselves locally during extreme weather events is part of the effort to mitigate the risks and impacts of wildfires, tornadoes, floods and other incidents, says Ault.

Digitalization can help utilities meet decarbonization targets by optimizing existing infrastructure through automation and intelligent controls.

The acceleration of grid transformation across the energy sector will present a huge opportunity for all industries to gain a strategic advantage by creating new possibilities around clean energy for organizations in a highly competitive global business landscape.

By speeding up the energy transition in the sectors that emit the most carbon—energy, transport and materials manufacturing—digital technologies have the potential to reduce global emissions by 20% by 2050, according to the WEF.

“Modern communications networks essentially have to be deployed to allow us to integrate more and more renewables into the mix, at all levels of the power grid and in ways that are resilient,” explains Kelly-Detwiler.

The pressing need to reduce carbon emissions is forcing industries to behave differently—and the networks that underpin digitalization are key to helping us speed up the transition to net zero.