Electricity demand is growing rapidly, driving utility capital investments and presenting challenges for all industry stakeholders. Under the present set of challenges these changes to our industry represent an extraordinary opportunity to provide more energy services with less added utility capital. If more services are delivered with less costs, the denominator counterbalances the numerator effect and unit rates could be pushed down.
To give this strategy a name, we call it clean capital efficiency. The idea is simple: use the next generation of AI-enhanced technologies to make the overall system more flexible, responsive, and efficient, rather than larger. This is obviously a good idea from the standpoint of affordability. However, modernizing transmission and distribution will also continue to make the system cleaner by managing demand growth and integrating more renewables upstream and downstream.
