The Key Challenges for the U.S. Power Market

By Chris Nichols, Content Strategist

The world’s power markets are in the midst of major changes, with coal giving way to natural gas in certain regions, solar and wind gaining ground, and deregulation taking hold in nations such as Mexico.

In the U.S., home to the largest economy on Earth, there’s no shortage of questions and concerns around the nation’s electric grid and how it should prepare for the decades ahead. At the midpoint of 2017, a number of critical developments affecting the energy sector have made headlines, most recently President Trump’s announcement that he plans to withdraw the U.S. from the climate accord known as the Paris Agreement. However, a great deal could still happen on the regulatory front, and all of it has to be watched.

With this in mind, Michael W. Hinton, Allegro’s Chief Strategy & Customer Officer, recently took the time to address a few of the key issues around the electric grid, and his thoughts appear this week in a column published in Distributed Energy.

Of note, he writes that, regardless of what else might happen legislatively, the “power industry will likely continue to transition to ‘new’ energy sources and away from coal” as the years pass. But as it does, challenges will undoubtedly arise, some of which could be considerable. What should we expect, then? Read on to get his take.