Rethinking Our Relationship with our Power Utilities

Here’s an article that discusses the economics by which utility customers  — both consumers and businesses – are leaving the grid in favor of solar and battery storage.  This isn’t something that will occur in the distant future; the trend is already underway, and it’s accelerating as the prices of solar PV and batteries fall, and the efficiency of our buildings improves.

The problem, of course, is that this leaves fewer (and less affluent) people as the utilities’ remaining customers.

Perhaps it’s time to take an obvious but much resisted step: rethink the relationship we have with our utilities from the ground up.  We’ll always need them around, just not in the way we wanted them when we laid the rules down 100 years ago.