The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is “an independent, non-partisan nonprofit that drives the efficient and restorative use of resources.”  In its recent book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era, RMI presents four achievable scenarios (Maintain, Migrate, Renew, and Transform) for moving forward with electricity generation, delivery, and consumption over the next 40 years.

In RMI’s “transform” scenario the centralized grid system, with its high costs, poor incentives for energy efficiency, and vulnerability to extreme weather and cyber-attacks, shifts to a much more decentralized microgrid system that is much more efficient, reduces energy consumption, provides direct financial benefits locally, is flexible, and enhances the grid’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to power failures:

“Aggressive energy efficiency adoption flattens and then reverses demand growth. Renewables’ installed capacity grows substantially, including a large capacity of distributed resources such as rooftop solar, combined heat and power (CHP), fuel cells, and small-scale wind. The grid exploits renewables’ geographic and technological diversity to improve load-following and reduce system costs. Unlike Renew with its more centralized renewables, this scenario would site most generation resources at or near customers. With more distributed generation and deployment of smart grid technology, the grid could be clustered in interlinked “microgrids” that could stand alone when necessary and improve the grid’s resilience against power failures.” http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-Electricity_scenarios

Such a transformation is in fact already happening. New York state recently committed $40 million dollars to  NY Prize, a competition to encourage the development of community microgrid systems that foster clean energy, reduce costs, and build reliability and resiliency into the electric grid.  NY Prize seeks to develop community partnerships among utilities, local governments, and the private sector to create a collaborative and innovative environment for the modernization of New York State’s electric grid.

In Vermont, Burlington recently made the headlines for being the first US city that is powered 100 percent from locally generated renewable sources. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/burlington-what-works-green-energy-214463