On January 30th, 2012, Pike Research LLC (Boulder, Colorado, U.S.) announced that it released a new report that analyzes the global market opportunity for micro-grids across five key application segments: campus, military, remote, community, and commercial & industrial.

According to Pike Research’s Microgrids report, micro-grid capacity worldwide will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 22% over the next five years, reaching 4.7 GW by 2017, which represents USD 17.3 billion in annual worldwide revenue by the same year.

Micro-grids offering energy reliability, managing variable, bidirectional energy resources

Micro-grids, or integrated systems in which distributed energy resources (DERs) operate as a single, autonomous grid either in parallel to or isolated from the existing utility power grid, offer customers and distribution utilities a host of new ways to bolster reliability and manage variable, bidirectional resources.

In addition, their smaller scale results in far fewer line losses, a lower demand on transmission infrastructure, and the ability to rely on more localized sources of power generation. All of these benefits are stimulating increased demand for micro-grids on a worldwide basis, in a range of application scenarios including campus environments, military operations, remote/off-grid settings, community/utility systems, and commercial and industrial markets.  

“Several new players have recently entered the micro-grid market, signaling that a new race is on to take advantage of the significant opportunity that micro-grids represent on a worldwide basis,” stated Senior Analyst Peter Asmus.

"Most notably ABB, the Swiss industrial giant that is a leading player in transmission and distribution infrastructure, and Boeing, the veteran defense contractor that is engaging with Siemens in a strategic alliance to serve the U.S. military, as well as San Diego Gas & Electric – one of the leading utilities in this space – and Green Energy Corporation, which is addressing the interoperability of various controls and communications platforms being deployed for micro-grids.”

Developing world is the most promising long-term market for micro-grids

Micro-grids still face significant barriers to wide scale adoption. As of 2012, not a single national government has developed an integrated or comprehensive policy creating a viable, vibrant market for customer-driven micro-grids. With the exception of Denmark, few other countries are even examining the complex policy issues involved when aggregating DERs not owned by utility companies on a broad scale. While North America is still clearly the leader in terms of planned capacity, the developing world remains the most promising long-term market. In particular, the remote/off-grid segment has emerged as the clear leader in terms of revenue and is arguably the most mature in terms of commercial status.

2012-02-02| Courtesy: Pike Research | solarserver.com © Heindl Server GmbH

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