OREANDA-NEWS. August 24, 2016. “The Utilities industry is at a tipping point,” writes Ganesh Kalyanaraman. “The present Utilities model ? bulk generation, bulk transfer, retailing under a regulated or deregulated framework ? has more or less stayed the same since Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Power Station went into operation in 1882 in New York. The model is efficient, reliable and does precisely what it is expected to do.” Excerpts:

“There are several indicators that the industry needs to prepare for a rethink, as what the grid was designed for is changing. Prominent among these indicators are:

- Bi-directional energy flow to accommodate microgrids and prosumers (people who produce as well as consume), which the current grid wasn’t designed for,

- Increasing popularity and viability of distributed renewable generation and allied technologies (distributed generation and microgrids, electric vehicles, storage, energy neutral homes of future), lessening the need for bulk transfer, and

- Growing need to reduce reliance on fossil/nuclear generation, which is central to today’s vertically integrated Utilities.

A very likely scenario is that of Utilities reinventing themselves as more customer-savvy and more agile entities, co-existing with alternative service providers or providing alternative services themselves to meet the new needs of a multi-player ecosystem consisting of renewable providers, distributed generators, prosumers, electric vehicles, and so on.

Utilities would need a dramatic change in their mindset for this transformation to happen, a departure from one resulting from a regulation-protected environment to one that puts the customer at the center of everything they do. They would need to build deep technical capabilities to enable these sophisticated services, such as smart grid, distributed generation, microgrids, virtual power plants, digital plant operations and management of assets, work, workforce, and customer experience.

The Utility of tomorrow will be a fundamentally different company — more performance-oriented, technically diverse, larger in scale, leaner and characterized by the use of sophisticated technologies, technology-driven intelligence and automation — that will script its own unique story of transformation and reinvention.”