The imminence of a distributed generation explosion in the United States has utility companies preparing for the repercussions.
At the Edison Electric Institute Annual Convention in San Diego earlier this month, CEOs from the country’s largest investor-owned utilities gathered to discuss the future of electric.
For Duke Energy CEO and newly elected EEI Chairman Lynn Good, that meant promoting utilities as a more customer-centric industry.
“As I think about the transformation that’s underway — the new technologies that are being introduced, the fact that our customers are expecting more from us — the history of undifferentiated products and running a bulk power system will really minimize our transformation if we just leave it there,” Good said.
“But if we go beyond it and really embrace the notion of customer experience and customer value in a way that I know we’re capable of, I believe we will transform in a way that delivers great value…exceeding expectations, [providing] more choices, more channels, more technologies.”
Such change will certainly be required to accommodate what analysts anticipate will be an “explosive growth” in distributed energy over the next five years.
At the Grid Edge Innovation Summit, which was held earlier this week outside of San Francisco, Ben Kellison, grid edge director at GTM Research, said that U.S. utilities “need to change, and are slowly changing,” in response to the growth of distributed energy resources.
According to Kellison, in 2017 five classes of behind-the-meter DERs contributed 46.4 gigawatts of impact on the U.S. summer peak. By 2023, that figure is expected to grow to 104 gigawatts of flexible capacity, “led by growth in distributed solar, along with a big increase in the capacity available from smart thermostats, and a rising share of EV charging.”
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