Power Utilities – “Dinosaurs Waiting To Die”

Does the world pay attention when little ol’ Craig Shields says that the power utilities are in trouble, due to distributed generation and microgrids? Hardly. But when the best minds at Citibank (see article linked above) say essentially the same thing, referring to them as “dinosaurs” – and pointing out that change is happening much faster than anyone could have predicted — that gets some consideration.

At issue, of course, is the fact that we want something fundamentally different from our utilities today than we did 100 years ago when they first came on the scene. In particular, we want to consume less (not more) electricity and we care greatly about how it was generated. The utilities will either understand this and make the required modification in their businesses, or they will, indeed, go the way of the dinosaurs.