From Renewables to Blackouts: What I Heard at CIGRE Paris

CIGRE Paris brought nearly 15,000 participants from more than 100 countries together to talk about the challenges facing power systems today. But what stood out wasn't any one technology or trend. It was how interconnected the challenges have become.

Renewable generation is increasing. Data centers are creating new and significant loads. Grid operators are dealing with large disturbances and thinking differently about resilience. At the same time, technologies like AI are opening up new possibilities for how we operate the grid.

These aren't separate conversations. They all come back to the same question: How do we keep the grid reliable as the system changes?

Where Voltage Management Comes In

That question is at the heart of my research in advanced voltage management. As more wind and solar connect to the grid, keeping the system stable becomes more complex. My CIGRE paper, “Integrated Framework for Advanced Voltage Management in High Renewable Penetration Systems: From Reactive Power Coordination to Look-Ahead Optimization,” looks at how better voltage management can help address that challenge.

At the poster session, the conversation quickly moved from the research to its practical application. People wanted to understand how the approach works, how it compares with other techniques, and how it could be applied to challenges they are facing.

That’s important because grid operators need solutions that work beyond the research itself. Resource Innovations has been working in advanced voltage management since 2010, applying these approaches to real-world grid challenges and learning from the data and results.

The Grid Challenges Behind the Headlines

Some of the most valuable conversations happened outside the formal sessions.

Discussions that started around renewable integration often expanded into broader concerns about blackouts, resilience, grid operations, AI, and the challenges of connecting new data centers to the grid.

Recent large disturbances, including the events in Spain and Portugal, were a recurring topic in conversations about grid resilience. They raised questions about how quickly grid operators can identify and respond to problems—and how better planning, coordination, and grid operations can prevent a localized disturbance from becoming a much larger outage. These are questions we’re also exploring through our work.

We also had conversations with potential partners about where our capabilities could complement theirs, leading to follow-up meetings and new ideas about what we might accomplish together.

The Challenges Are Global

One of my biggest takeaways from CIGRE is that the challenges we're working on aren't unique to the U.S.; grid operators around the world are facing many of the same questions, even as their systems and circumstances differ.

That creates an opportunity. We don't have to solve every problem from scratch. We can learn from what's working in other parts of the world, adapt those ideas to the U.S. grid, and bring our own experience to the conversation.

That's what I'm taking home from CIGRE: new ideas, new relationships, and new possibilities for putting what we've learned to work.