Better to compete from within than fight from afar.
Kristian Hanelt is senior vice president of renewable capital markets at Clean Power Finance.
We’ve reached a turning point in how we think about electricity. We’re seeing a massive upheaval in how utilities generate, transmit and deliver the product to consumers, with ramifications for everyone connected to the grid. Distributed generation (DG) resources, particularly third-party financed solar installed at the customer premises, are changing not only physical infrastructure but also how consumers relate to their electricity providers and how they use electric power.1
Much has been made recently about utility antagonism toward solar energy – whether DG solar poses an existential threat to utilities. Some utilities see solar as a menace to their business model. They’re actively fighting against its mass adoption. Other, more forward-thinking utilities are exploring ways to turn threat to advantage: to incorporate distributed energy resources (DER), including DG solar, in their own product mix to meet evolving customer demands.2