Guidehouse
Hector Artze is a partner in Guidehouse’s global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment. He assists clients with crafting their smart grid strategy and leveraging the integration of new and existing technologies to transform businesses and organizations. With a professional career that spans more than twenty-two years in the electric utility field, his expertise includes contract negotiations, process improvement, asset management, distribution operations, emergency restoration processes, evaluation and implementation of information technologies for electric utilities, major accounts management, government contracting, energy conservation, quality improvement, and construction services.
Traditionally, resource and investment planning have followed a linear process. Utilities forecasted future supply needs taking into account the expected load reduction of demand-side management programs, and then scaled their generation, transmission, and distribution capacity to meet demand by deploying investments in new utility-scale generation.
Since the 1980s, increased energy efficiency kept the need for explosive generation development in check by decoupling energy consumption from economic growth and doubling energy productivity.
Now, the investment and resource planning landscape are much more complex. Multiple policies and regulations with varying compliance demands make a single formula unfeasible. Corporate and individual customers, regulators, and investors are increasingly demanding utilities set decarbonization targets for transitioning to low- and no-carbon energy generation.
Meanwhile, distributed energy resources are projected to grow significantly. Global spending on DER in commercial buildings alone is likely to reach $38.6 billion by 2030, with an annual compound growth rate of 9.1 percent.
But even with expected increases in DER, energy efficiency, and energy-smart technologies, energy demand is expected to rise significantly as the energy transition drives mass commercial and residential adoption of electric vehicles, as well as building and industry electrification initiatives.