Electric Power Utilities Face Tough Times

I don’t claim to know about what the utilities are really talking about behind closed doors.  Reading between the lines, I would have to think the level of stress is starting to build, as numerous industry trends seem to militate against them.  In particular:

• Large customers are leaving.  Do they feel their demands/ needs for power from cleaner sources are not being met?  Can they make their own power cheaper?  I don’t know, but as discussed here, some big ones are hitting the breeze.

• Distributed generation is trending up, and every incremental watt of solar (and, to a lesser degree, wind and the others) installed means one of theirs is no longer required.

• Utilities take a huge public relations hit from individual rate-payers; they’re blamed for incompetence when there are outages, for price-gouging, and for being ecologically insensitive.

• One  would think that the advent of electric transportation would represent an opportunity for them to be heroes, but they don’t seem excited about it – or even to understand it.

Doesn’t sound like a picnic to me.