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More like: business model of utilities disrupted by distributed energy resources. Also, peak demand in CA is at 9 pm, not noon: https://www.caiso.com/outlook/
by dmckeon 14y ago
More like: business model of utilities disrupted by
distributed energy resources.
Also, peak demand in CA is at 9 pm, not noon:
https://www.caiso.com/outlook/outlook.html https://www.caiso.com/outlook/outlook.html
The underlying problem is the mismatch between
the old business model:
Generate, distribute, and deliver electricity;
charge for connection to grid and for
electricity delivered and consumed.
and the new situation:
Generate *or* purchase electricity from various providers,
including households with solar panels,
distribute and deliver electricity,
charge for distribution, delivery, availability,
and for electricity consumed.
Consider the migration of television from broadcast to CATV to cable
to the current YouTube / TiVo / Hulu / whatever model - basically,
a shift from a hierarchical top-down head-end driven model to a
widely distributed model.
Utilities are facing a similar disruption, and their challenges
include restructuring their generation / collection / distribution
system; the costing and billing to support that; the regulatory
and funding environment to cope with all of that; and to do it with
generating plant equipment that will have very long term costs. I wish them luck.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoWhile I agree with you 100%, I think the real challenge is going to be people not wanting to pay for the invisible "availability and distribution" when they've spent their entire life being trained they were paying for the electrons themselves. If I were in that business, I would be putting a lot of marketing dollars into retraining people that the value of availability and distribution is a good percentage of the costs that they incur today, so when a customer starts generating their own electrons, they already know there is value in being attached to the network, value that corresponds with continued revenue for the company.
- Zigurd 14y agoThese are touchy subjects with vertically integrated monopolies. The equivalent to separating the value, and price, of transport from other services in telecom is called "structural separation." Telcos don't like it one bit. They prefer pricing and costs to be opaque. It may be that obfuscating costs and margins in consumer electric service is just as advantageous to the utilities.
- tedsanders 14y agoQuestion: the daily peak is at 9pm, but what time of day is the yearly peak? I imagine the yearly peak might be earlier in the day, because it will occur on very hot days. The time of day of the yearly peak is more important for capacity planning than the time of day of the daily peak.
- jusben1369 14y agoThe peak time in CA in summer is 2 - 5pm. It's driven by office AC. After 5pm many offices up the temperature a few degrees for overnight effectively dropping demand. It can peak again after 7pm due to home AC and washer/dryer/dishwasher but that 2 - 5pm in the height of summer is always the peak.
- sophacles 14y agoYou are missing one giant term in the equation: utilities are subject to a shitload (technical term) of regulation. Of course they are opposed to the changes in the assumptions behind those regulations, without a carefully considered change to the regulations such that they can repsond to disruption, and therefore have an actual chance of surviving/pivoting/whatever.
- ghouse 14y agoPart of the reason demand in CA is at 9 PM is due to more than 1 GW of "behind the meter" solar. From the perspective of the grid, this is a decrease in daytime demand. However, the primary reason for 9 PM demand is that it's spring. Summer peak demand is mid-afternoon, and winter has two peaks -- morning (~8 AM) and evening (~ 6 PM).
- jusben1369 14y agoCorrect. Many of us who were in CA during the brown out dot com boom years became addicted to that site and understood the cycles.