Need for New Regulatory/Business Models

Deck: 

How to Help Them Understand the New Competitive Marketplace

Fortnightly Magazine - August 2016
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The electric generation system evolves as distributed generation capabilities become more prevalent and cost-effective. Personal communications devices and applications permit customers and utilities to interact on almost an equal basis through transactive energy systems.

Energy efficiency and conservation competes with renewable energy for policy and economic primacy. Policy-makers and regulators struggle to keep up. And I am struck by an irony.

This country began with each household and business being responsible for generating its own heat and light. We moved from burning wood and whale oil on the east coast, and burning buffalo chips and candles in the Midwest, to hydropower fueling mechanical systems, to multiple competing electric generators in cities.

Ultimately, the electric industry consolidated, became vertically integrated, and the regulatory model was developed by political policy-makers to balance competing utility and consumer interests. While taking different forms, an identifiable regulatory or political oversight process applies to investor-owned, cooperative, and municipal systems.

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