Last edited Tue Mar 4, 2014, 01:41 AM - Edit history (1)
With EV production spurring investment in high capacity battery pack the cost per kWh of high quality, long lasting storage is rapidly declining.
If you like an interesting search term try "utility in a box".
NRG’s David Crane Warns of ‘Shockingly Stupid’ Planning in the Power Sector
Katherine Tweed
February 25, 2014
"Resiliency" is a buzzword in the American utility industry that is becoming a business strategy in itself. But regulators and utilities may have trouble building business cases on resiliency if they're already having problems with the classic model, according to David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy.
“Think how shockingly stupid it is to build a 21st-century electric system based on 120 million wooden poles," Crane said during the fifth annual ARPA-E Energy Summit. "You can strengthen the system all you want, but if you accept that we’re in the first stage of adaptation, the system from the 1930s isn’t going to work in the long term.”
Crane is often introduced as a utility executive at conferences, a misnomer that sends shivers up his spine, he says. NRG may not be a regulated, vertically integrated utility, but it is an incumbent power producer that has about 53,000 megawatts of generation, most of which is oil, coal and natural gas. But it is also an energy company looking toward the future, with solar, energy retailers and electric vehicle networks all under the corporate umbrella.
...“I don’t understand why it’s so shocking [to imagine a scenario] where the grid is, at best, an antiquated backup system to a different way of buying electricity,” he said.
Even NRG's peaking ...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/forget-about-resiliency-david-crane-says-utilities-are-failing-at-primary-m
Is Utility 2.0 a Forecast or a Post-Mortem?
John Farrell
February 26, 2014 | 8 Comments
tombstones
For the last six months, the energy news sphere (perhaps led by the Edison Electric Institute) has been rife with a discussion about the threat to the utility business from distributed energy like local solar, as their customers shift to getting their own power from nearby renewable resources. Reports and news stories – e.g. “Adapt or Die” – suggest changes to the electric utility business model are imminent as power generation shifts from massive to medium scale and from remote to local.
For some utilities, this discussion is not a forecast, but a post-mortem.
Electric utilities have always built infrastructure (power lines, power plants, etc.) as long-term investments. They relied on growing electricity demand and sales to help recoup the costs of new coal-fired power or (over budget) nuclear retrofits in the Midwest or new high-voltage power lines in the Northeast. Utility commissions played along, allowing them cost recovery and generous returns on equity (10-11 percent) for new infrastructure. But hardware that seemed wise in the 1990s and 2000s is suddenly and rapidly being exposed as untimely and unnecessary.
Electricity demand has flattened (even fallen), thanks to energy efficiency legislation and economic stagnation. Customers are increasingly generating their own energy from renewable energy like solar, whose cost is falling by 10 percent or more per year. Not only is big infrastructure proving harder to pay off as revenues stagnate, it’s also increasingly irrelevant in a 21st century electricity system where power generation can be cost-effectively placed right on the roof.
Commercial wind power started to crack the facade 20 years ago, but today renewable energy is rapidly imploding the utility’s entire antiquated business model...
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2014/02/is-utility-2-0-a-forecast-or-a-post-mortem
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