Death spiral

The wide deployment of smart meters gives regulatory policy-makers a rare opportunity to change residential rate design. This can be done in a way that improves economic efficiency, and utility consumer and shareholder equity. Here we provide ten questions that should be asked by policy-makers, as well as some guidance in deriving the answers.

Let's make it clear also that affixing solar panels to your roof won't take you off-grid. Indeed it takes you to even greater dependence.

Today the rise of customer-centric technology and innovation has created a whole new set of challenges. Advances have occurred in energy efficiency, demand response, distributed solar, energy storage, and electric vehicles, as well as smart grid infrastructure and analytics. Electric utilities have two basic choices: react to the agendas of the special interests or chart a path forward to create the most value for stakeholders and customers.

Death spiral? Maybe not. But retail load – as served by utilities – will surely fall.

Load research data shows how utilities can levy a demand charge to recover costs fairly from residential customers with rooftop solar.