What do earthquake magnitudes, viral YouTube videos, and consumer-level electricity demand have in common? If you guessed: “they all exhibit long-tailed distributions,” you’re correct! ‘Long-tailed’ distributions refer to those in which a small number of occurrences take extreme values, far from the central part of the distribution.

Expansive electricity transmission networks reduce overall costs in the power sector by enabling economies of scale in generation, expanding access to cost-efficient energy resources, reducing the necessary reserve margin, and supporting grid integration of renewable assets.

In energy markets, generation assets get all the attention, and the transmission of that electricity to productive loads that will consume it is unsexy and often overlooked — but is a critical bottleneck to Africa’s high-energy future. Interconnected grids can unlock a clean energy future Physical and regulatory interconnectedness is one of the keys to improving the fiscal and operational performance of power systems.

Taneja, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, discusses his work on creatively accessing data in data-poor environments, the challenges in electrification via grid connections, and his work as an engineer and professor in the development sector. Jay Taneja is a Hub Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he directs the Systems Towards Infrastructure Measurement and Analytics (STIMA) Lab.

Millions of people around the world already drive electric vehicles (EVs), and sales will likely keep booming. In the first half of 2021, EVs captured 7.2% of the global market share of all new vehicles, nearly triple what it was in 2019.1 The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the stock of EVs will hit 145 million by 2030 – about 7% of all new and used registered vehicles in that year.2 Nigeria is building momentum for EVs too.