Report: Old business models holding back clean-energy shift

[kristopher]

Report: Old business models holding back clean-energy shift
Posted on 09/23/2013 by Karen Uhlenhuth


While cost and technological barriers are commonly seen as the primary factors holding back clean energy, a new report says outdated utility business models are the real culprit.

The report, dubbed America’s Power Plan, argues that rewarding utilities primarily for building and maintaining fossil fuel-driven power plants is putting a drag on a burgeoning revolution in the way the U.S. meets its energy needs.

...“The technologies are taking off,” she said. And they’re getting cheaper. The cost of solar installations has fallen by 80 percent in the last five years, according to the report. For wind turbines, it’s 30 percent.

However, utility companies are “running up against regulations that were designed for another era” when the country was growing and electrical service was having trouble keeping up. Now, Aggarwal said, it’s projected that U.S. demand for power will stagnate, or perhaps even decrease slightly. Priorities are changing.

The report lays out several policy shifts that, the authors contend, will allow the energy revolution to move into high gear. It proposes, among other things:

- Abandoning “rate of return” as a basis for utility profits, and instead rewarding them for meeting specific performance goals related to, say, reliability, low cost, minimizing emissions
- Hiking renewable energy requirements to let the marketplace know there will be a long-term demand for renewable energy
- Encouraging and formalizing distributed generation.
- Treating new generation as equal with energy freed up by efficiency measures.
- Creating a marketplace to buy and sell new energy-related services, such as the ability to quickly increase or decrease power production.

While many utilities are clinging to their traditional role ...

http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2013/09/23/report-old-business-models-holding-back-clean-energy-shift/

Post introducing the study "America's Power Plan"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112754333

[coldmountain]

1. Old business models are also holding back telecommunications and banking

Another good reason for breaking up some of these monopolies.

[cprise]

2. Those old business models are training their lobbyists as we speak.

They will get new standards and language defined that make wind and solar look like a disruptive nuisance. Then power generation will be added to class war politics.

[kristopher]

3. It won't work for them, the playing field is too large

This is a global event.They can limit penetration within their particular bailiwick, but they aren't going to constrain Asia, the Middle East or Africa. Deployment of manufacturing has progressed to a point where, in those areas alone, the economic case for renewables is strong enough to drive further expansion and product development. And much of that development is going to concentrate on microgrids and self contained systems.
In particular, efforts to block solar in order to preserve the customer base will inevitably result in the unintended consequence of more people going entirely off grid - especially as EV deployment drives high quality battery costs down.
The utilities have only three realistic options - they can either
1) make participation in the grid desirable for microgrids and residential solar
2) get passed a law that you must pay a tax specifically to support the utilities whether you receive their services or not, or
3) get put out of business completely and be replaced by a new entity that does #1 above.

[cprise]

4. Like universal healthcare, they don't care if it spreads globally

...as long as they can live as non-titular kings in their USA-shaped squalor zone in which to feel at home, unthreatened by any necessity for social responsibility.

American capitalism has turned into a medieval lunatic version of itself, having seen the writing on the wall. They would rather turn the US into Somalia than see their power challenged once again as it was in the 20th century.