An Industry Starts to Pivot: Electric Utilities' Shifting Business Models in the Rise of Solar

Amory Lovins and Karl Rabago saw this coming a long time ago.

Now the Wall Street Journal (not Grist, not Mother Jones, not Rolling Stone) references the EEI distributed solar dispatch from earlier this year and runs with it. Not just early/first mover NRG, but the old guard is chiming in too: AEP, Duke, Southern Co, Nextera, Dominion, PG&E ... you get the
picture.

First up is Nick Akins, American Electric Power CEO:

On its face you would look at it and say distributed generation is a threat. But on the other hand we see it as an opportunity because our business is changing. There's no getting around it.

Other big utility CEOs join the chorus and soon the message is unmistakable.

Energy Security Update: Renewables Economics Hitting German Utilities Hard

A week or so ago I posted about an EEI report warning that many if not most utilities are ill equipped to adapt to shifting business models arising from the build-out of distributed energy generation technologies.

In what some call a vicious cycle, the more technology allows customers to partially or fully remove their loads from the grid, the fewer payers there are to support the maintenance (let alone the modernization) of the grid's vast and aging infrastructure. I also asked readers to consider the implications for cybersecurity thinking and spending in the context of these types of mounting economic pressures.

Now I've got another article for you ...

Girding the Grid for Renewables

Economic cycles wax and wane, rebates and tariffs come and go, but guided by clear heads and pure hearts (not to mention lured by the prospect of future profits), technology-driven innovators march on.

These two indicators indicate that the grid's going to have a lot more renewables to manage in coming years:

• SmartGridNews on the UN's global renewables forecast
• Greentech Media solar sales update and forecast

So we'd better keep building out the new grid so it can handle all of this intermittency, right? Storage technology will play a key role and needs to get a lot better than it is today.

And we also might want to make the entire thing secure while we're at it. Banks can (and now, quite frequently, do) refund fraudulent charges made to your hijacked accounts, but it's not clear how utilities will make businesses or homeowners whole when cyber attacks disrupt power delivery.

Photo credit: Jumanji Solar on Flickr.com