Worldwide, over 700 million people live without access to the electrical grid. The majority of people afflicted by this form of energy poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. While significant progress has been in increasing electricity access in these regions, often overlooked is that in even so-called developed countries access to electricity is not universal.

As states and cities look to electrify, utilities are becoming both supply and delivery constrained. How do we solve this problem both in the planning domain and the operational domain.

The accelerating deployment of distributed resources is posing scalability challenges for the control and operations of modern electric power systems. Large numbers of smaller devices that are owned and operated by an array of stakeholder pose challenges for traditional centrally controlled systems. Microgrids have been shown to be one option for aggregating distributed resources into a single control point, but mixed ownership of microgrids poses further challenges because of potentially different operational goals. Consensus algorithms provide a potential method for mixed ownership microgrid controllers to distributedly achieve global operating goals.