We are on the cusp of a new era of power — the decentralized grid.

The electrical grid—one of North America's most valuable assets—was built and designed for a simpler time; a time where power generation and management was centralized under a handful of operators. Over the years, it has grown and evolved into an immense spider web of wires, devices, and software, stretching and operating across the entirety of North America.dropdown menu.

What transformed and powered yesterday is not enough to guide us into tomorrow.

The grid is a single harmonized and synchronized machine, with the harmony being not only impressive, but essential to getting power to consumers. Even the smallest of deviations can ripple across the network, knocking systems offline, plunging regions into darkness, and damaging highly valuable equipment.

As North America demands more energy than ever before, the aging infrastructure backing tens of millions of people faces a fundamental mismatch in attempting to coordinate diverse energy sources it was never designed to handle and their respective ever-increasing demand.

The problems with the grid extend beyond the aging architecture that powers it, and the challenge lies in how we communicate across hardware and software. Assets are becoming increasingly decentralized, and asset management and synchronization becomes increasingly impossible.

We need an entirely new approach to viewing our power grid and the assets upon it, and how they are going to communicate with each other, and ensure we build a more resilient power grid for generations to come.

The need for better communication amplifies as the grid becomes more decentralized. Grid operators must now orchestrate countless smaller Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) alongside traditional power plants, yet these DERs remain blind to the status and behaviour of other infrastructure elements around them. The core problem with the grid is not the need to build new assets, but to get existing ones to work together.

Software interoperability is 20 years ahead of hardware, and still not good enough to mediate this issue; Nevermind the largest coordination problem in the world — orchestrating the billions of pieces that make up North America's power grid, the world's largest machine, to keep it running smoothly.

More broadly, the digital representations of real systems are fragmented, and lack the resolution and data stream to make meaningful operational decisions in realtime. The “digital twin” for infrastructure that has been promised is fragmented across thousands of companies and millions of forgotten server rooms.

As a result, these systems continuously fail to drive value and deliver on promised outcomes. The reliance on analytics is not enough, and a transactions are essential to ensure continual operation and protection of the nations most valuable asset—the power grid.