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By Margaret Ryan

AOL Energy

Innovations in the way electricity is created and delivered are already under way to

"Other nations understand their success as nations depends almost entirely on their ability to electrify," Chris Hickman, CEO/President of Innovari, told GridWeek 2012 in Washington D.C. last week. Countries dealing with unreliable or insufficient power supplies are looking at distributed generating sources and microgrids in very different ways than the U.S. does, he said.

For instance, Hickman said, in an isolated village with no access to a central grid, installing one turbine, powering a single building housing multiple refrigerators for shared use, can be a transformative microgrid.

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In the U.S., many people talk of using microgrids to "secede" from the larger power system which functions well, he noted.

Terry Mohn, CEO, General MicroGrids, and head of a U.N. working group on microgrids, said the whole electric industry can benefit by providing services in impoverished areas. Those areas are innovating in "leapfrog technologies," he said, and just as cell phones leapfrogged the need for telephone land lines, microgrids are obviating the need for long transmission lines.

Major industry transformation could lie ahead
The industry will experience "reverse innovation," he predicted, where U.S. innovations taken to developing nations will be further adapted and brought back to the U.S. as new – and possibly technologically disruptive – concepts.

What will those innovations look like? No one's predicting. Speakers pointed to smartphone apps, which no one envisioned 15 years ago, and said the electric industry is about to experience the same magnitude of transformation that the telecoms industry did.

Speakers said smart grid and microgrid innovations in the U.S. are spreading slowly in part because of the current state regulatory system. Regulators want to see proof of value before they endorse investments, creating a risk-averse atmosphere.

In addition, the current regulatory system increasingly doesn't even address the new services that are emerging as technology enables more ways to create and deliver electricity.

Increasingly, the system is trying to fit irregularly-shaped pegs in round holes, speakers agreed, as new services at both the wholesale and retail level are devised, like various ancillary reliability services and customer microgrids.