Just as chemists are lauded for their skills at blending different elements to make new fake sugars and medications and artists are celebrated for their abilities to combine colors, so will scientists of the future be for merging different energy technologies.

At least that was the take-away from a panel discussion about integrated systems at the Global New Energy Summit in Colorado Springs this week.

“Integrated systems is about combining something with something,” said Eric Wesoff, senior writer for Green Tech Media and the discussion moderator. “Traditional power generation with solar. Solar with storage.”

Wesoff spoke about growth in the solar industry and noted that the United States is becoming a bigger market for the technology, but there are still some hurdles for it to get over before it can become ubiquitous.

“Energy storage is typically referred to as the Holy Grail,” he said as he flashed a slide of a graph showing solar power production at a typical plant—a wavy bell curve and a graph of wind energy production—a mess of thin lines flailing about like streamers on a kid’s bike. “Any intermittent activity like this is enough to cause a heart attack in the head of any utility company.”

That’s why the panel’s speakers are researching new ways to combine different energy production methods.

“We are about to move toward a more disrupted, decentralized system that features power moving in both directions,” said Bryan Hennegan, vice president of the environment and renewables for the Electric Power Research Institute.

He said he expects more renewable energy sources like large rooftop solar installations to become increasingly popular on the demand side, especially for large industrial and commercial operations.

He said that there is also an increase and will likely be more increased integration of renewable sources with traditional power generation systems in order to hedge against rising fuel costs.

“When natural gas goes up and you have the sun, run on the sun,” Hennegan said.

Don Gillispie, CEO of Alternative Energy Holdings, agreed with Hennegan that renewable energy sources will likely end up on the demand side with power moving from the traditional consumer to the grid instead of visa versa.

“We built a model home that generates about $50 a month of excess energy,” he said. “We built four of them and the key to these things is that anyone can have one. We have houses now that are $200,000 that have this technology on them.”

Gillispie also does a lot of work with nuclear power and said he believes we’re wasting the heat that the power generation creates. Instead of using energy to cool the nuclear reactors, we should be piping the heat off to create more electricity or to be used in water desalination.

Integrating systems isn’t just about combining different energy generation technologies, said Steve Cook with CH2M Hill. It’s also about connecting and linking our disconnected grid.

He said his company is currently working on connecting three different grids in the Southwest in order to transport solar and wind energy to the more populated areas where it’s needed most.

“We will do what hasn’t been done before in the United States,” he said. “We’ll connect the grids for three states.”

Sunil Cherian, CEO of Spirae in Ft. Collins, Colo., said his company has helped to revolutionize Denmark’s grid. The company connected all of the disparate parts of the grid and linked the country’s vast wind generation program. This June, Cherian said, the company will demonstrate how its system works by shutting down everything but the wind generation in one community, where 26,000 people will get their power only from that renewable source.

“The product itself that we sell is a layered control system,” he said. “All of the brains are pushed to the periphery of the system instead of bringing everything back to a central brain.”

That distribution is what Hennegan said he believes will characterize the next generation of energy innovation.

Image courtesy of American Partner Technologies.