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Tag:

electric utilities

Revolutionizing the Utility Model in New York

Revolutionizing the Utility Model in New York

written by The Vote Solar Initiative

On the heels of New York’s historic commitment to develop ten times more solar, the state is continuing to think big and bold when it comes to transforming its energy landscape.

This week, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) kicked off a major proceeding called ‘Reforming the Energy Vision’ (REV) that aims to fundamentally rethink how electric utilities do business (details here). The main thrust is to move towards an energy landscape that is increasingly decentralized with consumers playing a more active role in climate-friendly energy decisions.

Rethinking the century-old utility paradigm continues to be a hot topic as growing consumer demand for solar and other distributed energy resources raises fundamental challenges and questions.  And New York regulators want to take these questions head-on and make bold changes to support the energy future that New Yorkers want for their state.  “Business as usual just doesn’t cut it anymore,” suggested Public Service Commission Chair Audrey Zibelman, as quoted in a recent New York Times editorial.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.  New Yorkers want more clean, renewable energy powering their homes, businesses and communities – as stated by Zibelman, our outdated utility system is simply not designed to support that local, decentralized and clean energy.

We need a new utility model that’s built from the ground up to allow New Yorkers to take action into their own hands and repower their state with sunshine and other clean energy resources.  As this process unfolds before the PSC, we believe state regulators should pay special attention to these three goals as they’re considering what comes next:

  • Build a more inclusive clean energy marketplace that allows and even encourages direct customer participation.
  • Design an energy marketplace that properly recognizes and rewards the very real value of that clean, local power to the state’s grid, public health, environment, and economy.
  • Ensure that existing programs – like NY-Sun, the Renewable Portfolio Standard, Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard and Systems Benefit Program – can continue to fulfill their purpose of successful market transformation in the new energy marketplace.

The PSC will be deliberating the REV over the coming months, and likely years. We are happy to see the agency starting by designing an inclusive and transparent process that will give stakeholders like Vote Solar the opportunity to weigh in along the way. We look forward to participating in this exciting visioning process with our own focus on empowering New Yorkers to go solar.



May 16, 2014 2 comments
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Fixing People, Not Just Buildings

written by Walter Wang

Electric utilities operated under a rarified business model for decades. Their customers were captive so they rarely had to think about what motivated them to buy. New government energy efficiency mandates have changed that, and done so with an ironic twist. Now utilities must figure how to get their customers to refrain from buying.

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December 9, 2011 0 comment
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Q1 Registers Growth For Wind Industry in the U.S.

written by Walter Wang

Wind power can now supply 10 million American homes, says a new report by the American Wind Power Association.

The organization says the industry installed 1,100 MW of new wind power capacity in the first quarter of 2011 and entered the second quarter with another 5,600 MW under construction.

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May 3, 2011 0 comment
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Asian Smart Meter Market to Surpass 350 Million by 2016, Report Says

written by Yale Environment 360

The number of smart meters in Asian markets will increase from 52.8 million in 2010 to more than 350.3 million by 2016 as governments and electric utilities across the region increasingly emphasize the technology, according to a new market report.

That represents an annual growth rate of

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February 15, 2011 0 comment
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Who Is the eBay of Electricity 2.0?

written by Tony Seba

Imagine a world where you can buy electricity from your choice of vendor (not the utility) at prices that can be negotiated with the vendor. Kind of like shopping at eBay or Amazon. Want to buy a week’s worth (1,000 kWh) of power from SebaSolar at 9 ¢/kWh? Just click here. How about switching to WindyWelly for the weekend (300 kWh) at 8.5 ¢/kWh? Click! Wait, NeoGeo just announced it has a ‘fire sale’ at 7 ¢/kWh for next Tuesday through Thursday. Click!

Well, imagine no more. This electricity world exists today. To see this new architecture of energy at work I went to Wellington, New Zealand.

Powershop is a unit of Meridian Energy, the largest electricity generator and retailer in New Zealand. “The vision of Powershop is to be like eBay for electricity,” says CEO Ari Sargent. “Any electricity generator in New Zealand, including Meridian’s competitors, can offer their own brands of electricity at different prices and different times.”

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May 24, 2010 5 comments
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Smart Grid Needs GOLD — Engineering Jobs With Electric Utilities

written by Elisa Wood

As John McDonald tells it, smart grid needs GOLD. And he’s not talking money. GOLD stands for Graduates of the Last Decade, the technology savvy, risk-taking engineers and technicians who may be among the greatest benefactors of the new smart grid movement. While most recent college graduates face dismal employment prospects, for the GOLD kids, the job market is, well, golden.

“I’ve never seen electric utilities and suppliers outbidding each other for a bachelor’s degree,” said McDonald, who has had 35 years in the energy business and now serves as an IEEE Fellow and general manager of marketing for GE Energy T&D.

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April 9, 2010 4 comments
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Few Utilities Power Ahead with Renewables

written by Joe Walsh

As surely as last year’s Paris fashions make their way west to New York, U.S. utilities are beginning to embrace European-style programs like feed-in tariffs and green power premiums.

State-level decoupling regulations are easing that transition to some extent. But many utilities are still reluctant to embrace the change fully, especially as prices for conventional energy have come back down and utilities are finding that available capacity in voluntary green power is going unsubscribed.

Utilities do not like the financial uncertainty posed by long-term contracting for renewable power to supply the programs if they are not going to be able to move the power. It inevitably puts the utility’s shareholder obligations at odds with its ratepayer obligations and results in one of two solutions: green premiums go up and make the company look bad on green; or, everyone on the system pays to cover the nut, and no one is happy.

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March 12, 2010 2 comments
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We’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’

written by Ryan Legg

I’ve had quite the relationship with my energy company. When I moved to New York, we fell in love. I would always pay attention to her needs – buying “green” energy when she installed wind turbines and reading my bill every month to compare usage to the previous month and 12 months prior, and she rewarded me for my efforts with a bill that required less and less every month.

But over the past four years I’ve started to settle down, and I’ve started to take my dear energy company for granted, and I feel like she’s beginning to take me for granted as well. I still keep my consumption low and pay on time to keep us both happy, but she’s stopped expanding into wind and solar technologies and now the spark is gone (pun intended). Our underlying relationship hasn’t changed – she still uses the same fundamental business model and I still only see my electricity usage once a month when the bill comes. To say the least, neither of us are doing anything new and the relationship has grown stale.

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February 9, 2009 2 comments
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Smart Grid: Technology is the easy part

written by Vincent Gautier

It seems new smart technologies emerge by the day: smart plug-in cars, smart dishwashers, smart coffeemakers… The future will be Green, no doubt about it! For all the praises I have for the engineers and scientists that make it happen, I believe that this is the easy part of making the power grid smart. Implementation of the transformation will be the hard one.

Scale is an obvious challenge. Developed countries’ power grids have been built all along the 20th century, requiring titanic levels of investments. Upgrades, retrofits and greenfield additions will require a comparable level of efforts. And time. Lots of it. For utilities, short term means 5 years. For my generation of impatient go-getters, used to have everything a click away, grasping this relation to time is a challenge.

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December 17, 2008 3 comments
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