For decades energy and environment writers have been reporting on the eco-dreamers who hope and plan for a time when renewable, distributed energy and its frugal use brings low-carbon gigawattage to the nation's homes, factories, and mega-malls. That means solar panels, heat pumps hooked to buried thermal buffers, ultra-efficient buildings, bio-diesel and electric cars, wind farms all over the place and other greenie stuff making for a robust, resilient, and not-Earth-destroying way to get some real work done around here. And while a national grid would presumably still be useful, power blackouts would not take down as much. Lots of businesses and communities could keep their lights on with gizmos of their own.
The serious, gray people scoffed. Was it Dick Cheney who said such things may boost one's sense of personal virtue but are no way to run a profitable economy? That, the perceived wisdom had it, takes coal and oil, as always. Well, nuclear too, but that's one of the few things Cheney said that has seemed okay to me.
Out on the fringe of general media a few reporters and essayists have picked up signs of a technological and hard-nosed business phase shift. Recognition of its reality appears to extend across the political spectrum.
Get a load of these headlines.
- Grist – David Roberts: a two parter, Solar Power Could Destroy US Utilities, Say US Utilities ; and How can we boost distributed solar and save utilities at the same time? ;
- National Review Online – Reihan Salam : The Potential Impact of Distributed Energy Resources ;
- Greentech Grid – Chris Nelder: Can The Utility Industry Survive the Energy Transition?/ A new paper from the Edison Electric Institute raises numerous doubts ;
- KCET (blog at huge So Cal PBS outlet) Chris Clark: Are Utility Companies Doomed? ;
Most are at on line outlets, mainly specialty ones.Some are associated with old timey news operations. One bets we'll start seeing similar stories from the likes of NYTimes, Wall St. Journal, the big wire services, and such all. The message: 'distributed energy sources' and that means mostly, for now, solar energy farms, are not only getting good they are getting scary good. Wind presumably fits the general theme too. The word in play is "disruptive." As in if big customers start making and using their own electricity without cycling it through the grid, that along with regulatory mandates for renewable energy portfolios and subsidies could set off a death spiral for utilities. If they are forced to jack rates on the rest of us after a few but major customers stop paying premium prices for peak-load power they'll just lose more and more customers and so on till poof and adios.
It may be Roberts at Grist who first came across this development and gave it a public news splash this week, I am unsure. Several more versions are in circulation that cite his piece as a source and their news tip.
The cause of all this is a 19-page report dated January 2013. Roberts says it "went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence. …" That's hyperbolic. It is just one report and, as we'll see, hasn't yet gotten official endorsement by the industry. But here it is:
Grist for the Mill: Edison Electric Institute – Peter Kind/ Energy Infrastructure Advocates: Disruptive Challenges – Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business.
The report starts off a bit turgidly, but gets into good and persuasive passages that make it easy to turn into a news story. It asks, for instance, whether the growing heft of solar energy, so recently a marginal player, will spur utilities to follow the path of such outfits as AT&T and Verizon that got ahead of the trend and pivoted to wireless phone service as their land-line biz stalled, or falter and die as did Kodak when its efforts to jump aboard the digital camera train lost their grip (and as the US Postal Service seems to be doing as email and purely-private parcel carriers gobble the mails' former business.
The few sampled news and opinion accounts above raise many serious questions and propose responses. Interesting is the piece (and its long comment string) from the conservative National Review, where writer Salam embraces the prospect of a feisty, competitive energy market. A lot of his readers may be reluctant to see anything in Nat'l Review saying anything good about solar, what with its association in many righty minds with leftist tree-huggers and global warming fraudsters (my characterizations of what some others think, not his, and I don's subscribe to them anyway).
What is needed is diligent traditional reporting. What do people who have been in this game a long time make of this report from their varying points of view. How about an interview with Mr. Kind, the author? How novel does he think his thesis is? Other sources who could illuminate things include the redoubtable Amory Lovins, others at the National Renewable Energy Lab he founded, as well as the senior execs at utilities. How about the Electric Power Research Institute, a place embedded in the industry but not quite as devoted to utility profits as is EEI? Or somebody at the DOE? Plus, this is a report to the EEI, not a report by the EEI. It says right up front that while it should be attributed to EEI, the trade org. does not endorse its findings, at least not yet. It just commissioned the thing.
Is the report's thesis actually true – that energy storage technologies will soon allow big energy customers to just make their own renewables and make it reliable enough to use without any power company's meter box on the wall? Last I read, giant storage batteries and molten salt systems and such are a long-slog from mass, commercial use. And if such energy storage systems do become practical for off-grid use, doesn't that also mean that utilities could still compete and perhaps beat their price via the economy of scale of the giant solar and wind farms they are already starting to tap for their grids? Most important, no matter how disruptive distributed and renewable power sources might some day soon be, aren't they societal good things? I'd include small nuclear, little atomic, sealed fission batteries that can be put most anywhere and don't have to big giant baseload nuclear power stations like those still providing a fifth of US electric power?
Still, this is something to write about. Utilities that such a short time ago largely scoffed at solar and use it only because regulators required it, should scoff no more. Now, it says here, shudders are appropriate. Technology and its change are, we all know, the sculptors of modern society. The thing about modernity is it changes all the time and sometimes fast.
Dept. of Nothing New Under the Sun. Seth Borenstein, now at AP, took a look at this post and shot this over, from 14 years ago..
- Knight Ridder (July 7, 1999) Seth Borenstein: Consumer Interest grows for personal power plants ;
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