As the number of solar panels on business and home rooftops multiply, America’s power grid is bearing an electrical load that it was never designed to handle: bidirectional power transfer.

“There’s no grid system in the world designed for that,” said Anise Dehamna, principal research analyst at Navigant Research. “Every grid has been designed for unidirectional flow of energy — from transmission to distribution to the end user.”

With bidirectional power transfer, the utility still sends power to the customer, but with solar panels, the customer can then send excess power back to the utility.

Because power grids evolved organically in a bottom-up manner, as opposed to a centrally coordinated master plan, they were not designed to take on bidirectional power loads. America’s utilities are now facing a costly region-by-region infrastructure upgrade as new energy technology, such as smart meters, emerges. Battery storage offers some relief as it can reduce peak load demand on the grid while improving overall system efficiency, according to Dehamna.

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