Analysis-How Energy Efficiency Firms Are Eating Utilities' Lunch

[elleng]

PARIS/FRANKFURT — With better insulation, triple glazing and frugal boilers, new houses can cut energy use by up to 90 percent, which is good news for consumers but bad for utilities that vie with energy services firms for their efficiency euros.

An unstoppable efficiency drive spurred by EU regulations and national targets poses a dilemma for utilities.

Do they look for a profitable way to help consumers save energy or try to defend their traditional business model?

Products that reduce heating bills and therefore utilities' profits include heat pumps and condensing boilers from firms such as Germany's Vaillant or Viessmann, super-insulating materials from Belgium's Recticel or Ireland's Kingspan, and heat-retaining triple glazing from France's Saint-Gobain.

Bain & Company estimates that German households spend about 5 to 7 percent of their income - about 2,500 euros (£2,138) per year in today's money - on energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/06/02/business/02reuters-energy-efficiency-utilities.html?hp

[msongs]

1. "utilities" are an obsolete model trying to stave off inevitable change, especially in Hawaii.

here we have a monopoly electricity provider, a stock holder corporation, that served a purpose when imported oil was the only viable option to generate electricity. that provider has become a bloated giant that gives not one crap about customers because it is a monopoly with ever rising prices. Now, though, people can generate their own power via solar, which is abundant in Hawaii, so the utility is doing everything it can to stifle solar. The time has come to take over that company and make it serve the needs of the people of the state instead of its overpaid management and stockholders.
It is a dinosaur that is already dead but still walking.

[elleng]

2. Monopoly ALWAYS bad,

and we're fools if we allow them to exist and don't regulate them.

[diane in sf]

5. In CA we wrote the laws to reward utilities for efficency.

[kristopher]

3. Thought exercise: Imagine, if you will, a house.

What’s threatening utilities: Innovation at the edge of the grid

<snip>


This house is built (or retrofitted) efficiently, with thick walls, good insulation, and triple-glazed windows, so it wastes very little energy. It is heated and cooled by a system with sensors and separate vents in each room, controlled by a smart thermometer like the Nest that learns the habits of the house’s inhabitants and maximizes efficiency around them.

On our house’s roof is an array of solar panels that, at the mid-afternoon peak, provides more power than the house needs. For supplemental generation, when the panels aren’t producing or grid power is unusually expensive, the house’s basement contains a small microturbine running on natural gas (or biogas, if you prefer).

Excess energy from the solar panels can be stored in a fuel cell like the Bloom box, or in an appliance-sized battery pack, or in the batteries of the electric car parked in the garage.

...

All of this stuff — panels, batteries, heating and cooling system, appliances — is tied together by software that tracks consumption and monitors price signals from the utility. The software can ramp up generation, reduce or delay non-essential consumption, store more energy, or sell more energy to the grid, depending on which choice is more valuable at the moment. In the event of a blackout or other grid failure, the software can “island” the house from the grid, at least temporarily, by cranking up the microturbine, emptying the batteries or the fuel cell, and dialing down unnecessary consumption.

http://grist.org/article/whats-threatening-utilities-innovation-at-the-edge-of-the-grid/

What it is going to look like on the consumer side of the meter.

[RobertEarl]

4. IOW

Each house can become an energy supplier.

A miniature utility supplying power to the grid as needed.