Affordable solar roofs, windmills that fit in neighborhoods or large yards ... other distributed energy sources that may come down in price. These could make real inroads on utilities' traditional business if the technologies really take hold as some inventors and visionaries dream. Combined with truly interactive smart grid developments, these things would change the nature of utilities. Improbable right now, the idea is nevertheless intriguing, and one blogger makes an interesting suggestion for the business model if the time comes: Utilities could be like banks. But cool, in a geeky, IT-genius kind of way.
At knowledgeproblem.com, Michael Giberson says the bank idea could be seen as a little scary, given the mess banks have gotten themselves into; but that's not the point, he writes. Giberson points to a post at PowrTalk in which Chris Davis posits a "power company with more brains, less brawn."
(A Rob Walker piece in The New York Times Magazine a week ago focused on a business that could spur more distributed power activity -- 1BOG, which puts together collective buying efforts for renewable power installations. It's small, but it has vision.)
The brawn that is the base of the utility business -- the capital-heavy generation and transmission needs that make for such a tight relationship with Wall Street -- could turn into brains instead, if the utility were mainly managing the use and dispatch of a multitude of power sources. Just as a bank does not produce the money, but manages the money that others produce, a utility would use its smartness to make the most of the power that others produce. Then instead of being a stolid, physical-asset-heavy outfit, the utility would be "a scrawny, geeky, googilian smart power company that is laughing all the way to the bank."
Davis' model is highly undeveloped, but it teases at thought patterns, and that's a good thing.
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