How You Answered Eight Questions
Mackinnon Lawrence is a director in Navigant’s global Energy practice and leads Navigant Research. He is responsible for overall strategy and operations, including management of a global analyst team, development of the Firm’s Energy Cloud thought leadership framework, and client engagements supporting utility, oil & gas, telecom, manufacturing, IT, and consumer tech companies. His expertise covers energy transformation, business model innovation, and technology disruption.
For the fourth straight spring, Public Utilities Fortnightly asked you what you think about the state and future of power. Sponsored by Navigant, we developed and fielded an eight-question survey to tease out how PUF readers see some of the industry's most important trends.
Who completed the survey — specifically — is not known. It was intentionally confidential. But who completed the survey — generally — is known. Based on the demographic questions, thirty-eight percent of respondents are in senior management and twenty-one percent are in regulatory. And thirty-four percent are at utilities, fifteen percent are at utility regulators and twenty-seven percent are at vendors or professional services firms. The northeast, southeast, midwest and west were almost equally represented, at around twenty percent each, plus Canadians were nine percent of the respondents.
Which responses were most interesting to us? On survey question two, sixty-eight percent of the respondents said climate change is already posing a tangible threat to utilities. And on question five, sixty-nine percent said utilities should pursue a dual strategy investing in both current and new business models. And on question eight, sixty-five percent said tech and telecommunications companies pose the biggest competitive threat to utilities.
Well, let's get to it. How you all see where this great industry is heading.