I have some compassion for these authors trying to carve an understanding with old terms and concepts that don't quite fit.
Rewriting their article isn't in the cards today, so I'll try to stick to two small scale points that I don't think they adequately covered.
In a mature distributed system, the customer/client/partner(new term needed) can be at any one time, or concurrently, an end point user, a producer, or a node offering network services through storage or data with an FPGA. The same thing applies to that person's school district (flat roofs, parking lots, little summer use), or the city (bio waste to gas, co-gen heating districts), or bigger scale at the county level(wind farms, pig lots, hydro). It might help people having trouble with the concept of geographic distribution to think on a smaller scale first.
That way of seeing geographic, gen type, and market or social role realignment doesn't seem to fit the author's blocks of traditional gen/transmission/distribution/demand-side/optimize-oversight categories.
For example, there's an interesting phenomena which occurs with multiple roles, because where the authors see a a separate need of inducement for efficiency, it's already embedded at the small scale. At each of those levels I mentioned, there's a local decision to be made: produce for cash, or use now and forego the profit. In other words, for the individual, choose MTA over EV and sell the storage rather than burning it.
For all of the talk about markets in the article, they hardly mention that delaminating the customer base from its physical location would be the most disruptive.
The utility that Ursula Sladek formed in Schönau (pop. 2300) now has over 140,000 customers. EWS Schönau has done this by signing people up as their tariff provider. http://www.ews-schoenau.de/ It's been a slowly and steadily growing part of the market in DE, but now trends are sharply up.
Tariff providers themselves can have multiple roles, but functionally it breaks the link to vertical utilities and adds competition to the electricity market. Major producers have to sell to that market rather than a geographically captive one. I've been looking lately at how the tariff provider market purchase contracts work. Don't know yet. At any rate, when this market gets to be large enough, it becomes the one the wholesale market has to deal with.
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