Why DER Scalability and Intelligent Coordination Are Critical for Grid Resilience
The recent power outages across Spain and Portugal, on April 28, 2025, have highlighted a growing and urgent concern: the electric grid infrastructure is under immense stress. As the demand for electricity surges, grids are being pushed beyond their design limits. The blackouts that affected these regions are more than isolated incidents; they’re a signal of a system in need of transformation. While the exact cause is still under investigation, one fact is clear: the grid was not prepared to handle the complexity and scale of today’s energy landscape.
It’s suspected that the outage was caused by inadequate grid management and a lack of infrastructure to accommodate the high level of solar and wind generation. As the number of renewables increases, the harder it becomes for the electric grid to maintain balance and reliability. Scalable management of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) plays a crucial role in grid stability and management. Being able to scale DERs allows for balancing supply and demand in real time. When DERs are aggregated and managed effectively, they can supply power during peak demand and shift loads to off-peak hours. This balancing helps prevent frequency deviations and voltage instability, which are both major causes of power outages.
When DERs are networked and intelligently managed, they can support keeping the lights on during extreme events such as hurricanes and delivering essential grid services as evidenced by ERCOTs ERS program. During California’s heat waves in recent years, coordinated DER response has helped avert rolling blackouts by reducing peak load stress through demand response and localized energy generation. Similarly, virtual power plants (VPPs) leveraging DER networks have proven effective in stabilizing frequency fluctuations in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).
Kitu is currently working to scale deployments across the United States and Australia, with a focus on making DERs an asset, not a threat, to grid stability. Our Citadel platform is a scalable, flexible, grid-native DER service for utilities that need to meet the ever-evolving complexities of the modern energy grid. It is designed to securely communicate with millions of interconnected DERs either directly or through an aggregator.
