Agile Energy Systems: Global Lessons from the California Energy Crisis

Empowering decision makers by setting the vision for a new approach to energy systems and providing the tools and plans to achieve these objectivesProvides specific and actionable public policy and programme toolsHelp solve energy issues worldwide by illustrating how the lessons learned from the California energy crisis can be used to create an agile energy system for any region in a country

Due to the recent catastrophic energy system failures in California along with those in the North-Eastern US and Southern Canada, London, and Italy, the time has come to proclaim the failure of deregulation, privatization or liberalization and propose a new energy system. Agile Energy Systems shows in the first section, how five precipitating forces led to the deregulation debacle in California: (1) major technological changes and commercialization, (2) regulatory needs mismatched to societal adjustments, (3) inadequate and flawed economic models, (4) lack of vision, goals, and planning leading to energy failures, and (5) failure and lack of economic regional development.

The second half of the book examines how "civic market", new economic models, and planning for a sustainable economic environment counteracted these five forces to create an "agile energy system". This system is based on renewable energy generation, hybrid or combined and distributed generation technologies. Such an agile system can be a new paradigm for both energy efficiency and reliability for any region or country, in contrast to the brittle centralized energy grid systems created by deregulation. Furthermore, the book overviews how the future of energy systems rests in the emerging "clean" hydrogen economy.

Empowering decision makers by setting the vision for a new approach to energy systems and providing the tools and plans to achieve these objectivesProvides specific and actionable public policy and program toolsHelping to solve energy issues worldwide by illustrating how the lessons learned from the California energy crisis can be used to create an "agile energy system" for any region or country

The End of the Old Order: The Roots of Restructuring; Energy System Change in a Global Context; Energy System Change in a Global Context; Technological Change: From a Vertically Integrated to a Dispersed Electrical System; The Derregulation Debacle; Economic Models and Market Change; Knowing and Managing Complex Power Systems; Economic development and the Energy Crisis; Advanced Technologies for an Agile Energy System; Civic Markets: Public Oversight of an Agile Energy System; Civic Capitalism: A new economics for the public good; Planning for a Complex Infrastructure; Economic Development: Sustainability is Defined Improving Local Economies; The Hydrogen Freeway: The Road Ahead; Conclusion