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Electricity Utilities must change their business model as distributed energy races ahead

Report: Distributed-Renewables Disruption Will Reduce Utility Revenues By Up To $123 Billion A Year By 2025  Clean Technica, December 29th, 2014 by James Ayre 

The ongoing growth of distributed renewable energy generation throughout the US and Europe will see utility-company revenues reduced by as much as $123 billion a year by 2025, according to a new report from the consulting company Accenture.

That new report — titled the Digitally Enabled Grid report — clearly states that if the utilities wish to maintain a market share comparable to that of today, the companies will need to “fundamentally transform their business models.”………

As noted by the report, solar PV is actually already at grid parity in some parts of the US, the EU, and Australia. The expectation is that Japan will follow in that direction as well in a few years.

While the utility companies certainly have their work cut out for them, they aren’t facing extinction like some have predicted — according to de Miguel anyways. “While the ‘death spiral’, as commonly defined, is a myth, the demand disruption caused by the growing adoption of energy demand-disrupting technologies is a very real threat to utilities’ business models. And in addition to the financial pressure, this will cause significant operational challenges for utilities, increase technical stress on the grid and open the market to new competition for energy products and services.”

Given the growing number of executives at the utility companies that seem to be aware of the issues (see graph below), it seems pretty likely that some of the companies will institute major changes of some sort in the relatively near future………..

Those interested can find the full report here.   http://cleantechnica.com/2014/12/29/report-distributed-renewables-disruption-will-reduce-utility-revenues-us123-billion-year-2025/

December 31, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, business and costs, renewable