Solar And Batteries Are Changing The Solar Game

For around a century, most choices about the US electric grid have been given at the top by electric utilities, public regulators, and grid operators. It appears that this concept is changing. 

Small-scale solar has contributed one-fifth of new power plant capacity in each of the last four quarters, and over 10% in the past five years. One in 5 new California consumers of the nation’s largest residential solar company is adding energy storage to their solar arrays. Economic failure, when electricity customers produce most of there, is not only possible but rapidly growing cost-effective. As the flow of energy on the grid has shifted one-way to two-way, so has the potential to shape the electric grid’s future.

Power To The People

Legacy, baseload energy plants are becoming financially inferior to clean energy competitors.
Electricity sales have decayed as customers reduce use and produce electricity for themselves. Neighborhoods are reaping greater economic rewards from power generation, as electric customers, individually and collectively, produce more locally. Almost no service or utility regulator is adequately planning for this fundamental shift. Dozens of utilities across the country have proposed new gas-powered production that has little chance of remaining online through the end of its economic life due to stiff competition from solar-plus-storage. Some have been approved despite substantial gaps in the economic analysis.

Utility has also made rigid moves or made gestures inadequate to address the magnitude of system development. There tend to be three incompetent utility responses to the reversed flow of decision-making power:

Utilities have corrupted their reputations by resisting customer interest in distributed energy resources, sending lobbyists to preempt or curtail policies that reward customer-sited and customer-owned power production.

Large-Scale Solar

Utility investments in large-scale renewable power have addressed environmental concerns, but these low-cost energy purchases have not delivered reduce electricity prices for end users nor assuaged the interest in over 70 cities of reaching 100% renewable electricity more quickly.
Utilities have used utility-owned distributed energy resources, but in ways that withhold much of the economic or financial benefit from customers.
Regulators and state legislators cannot require incumbent utilities to respond adequately because the rise of economic solar-plus-storage challenges the century-old presumption of a natural electricity distribution monopoly. Instead, electricity market rules should facilitate fair compensation for distributed energy sources and market participants where technology already allows them to race.

This report details support for changing utility oversight and modifying electricity markets to transition from the terminal utility distribution monopoly to a vibrant, democratic power system where customers have the opportunity to choose distributed energy opportunities that benefit themselves and the greater grid.
 

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