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Distributed Generation & Microgrids

Here Comes the Sun

Growing Impacts of Residential Solar on Utility Customer Service

What does PV mean for utilities’ residential customer service operations? From helping customers with supplier selection, through installation and maintenance issues? And with billing? To begin to address this question, we conducted two sets of surveys of residential electricity customers in the second quarter of 2016.
Byline: 

Daniel Gabaldon, Matt Guarini and Jamie Wimberly

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Ratemaking and the Campaign Against Rooftop Solar

Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.

Regulators should ensure that changes to rate design seek to balance consumer and utility interests. Rates that are intended to insulate utilities from economic and technological change while providing no benefits to consumers ought to be considered unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.
Byline: 

Ari Peskoe

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Regulators Can Win the Trifecta with Residential Demand Charges

Advanced metering and demand charges give efficient and equitable price signals to customers.

The wide deployment of smart meters gives regulatory policy-makers a rare opportunity to change residential rate design. This can be done in a way that improves economic efficiency, and utility consumer and shareholder equity. Here we provide ten questions that should be asked by policy-makers, as well as some guidance in deriving the answers.
Byline: 

Ross C. Hemphill and Kenneth W. Costello

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The Consumer-Centric Utility

Empowering Consumers while Managing Risk and Optimizing Assets

Electric utilities do not simply sell a commodity. They sell safe, affordable, reliable and clean electric service. The “Consumer-Centric Utility” business model provides a viable framework for utilities while enabling new products and services that meet growing consumer expectations.
Byline: 

Jan Ahlen

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Energy Cloud Playbook

Building Competitive Advantage for Grid of the Future

The pace and impact of change in the energy industry are unrelenting. Utilities must rethink many of the assumptions that have anchored strategic planning to date. This requires that utilities play both defense as well as offense to remain competitive.
Byline: 

Mackinnon Lawrence and Jan Vrins

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Tale of Two Grids

What a review of PUC cases tells us about the future of consumer technology and grid modernization.

There may be a more fundamental schism that raises fundamental questions about the role of the distribution utility and footprint of the natural monopoly.
Byline: 

Cameron Brooks

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Commercial DG: Case for Financeable Contracts

DG lenders and developers should consider standardizing a model form of energy service agreement.

Let's review factors influencing the development of distributed generation, with an emphasis on the need for financeable and deployable contracts on which DG can be financed, constructed and operated.
Byline: 

Nicholas Giannasca

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PPL CEO Interviewed

We went to Allentown and talked with Bill Spence.

What are the most exciting things happening at PPL? What were the biggest challenges in that journey? Were there some tough challenges you had to get through?
Byline: 

Bill Spence, with Steve Mitnick

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New Regulatory Paradigm Needed Now

The time is now for establishing concrete rules, roles and responsibilities for utilities and other participants.

Driven by policy directives over which utilities have little control, DERs will remain both a threat and opportunity until regulators agree on a new paradigm to support distributed energy resources.
Byline: 

Paul A. DeCotis

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Microgrids and Battery Storage

In search of enlightened policy to build a solid business case.

A smart grid expert searches for a solid business case – and tells how to create enlightened policy to make it happen.
Byline: 

Massoud Amin

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