Christmas Wish – Let’s Rethink Our Relationship with Our Power Utilities

Here’s a Scientific American article on the problems that have been created in the Hawaiian electric power grid by the rapid expansion of PV.  Is this an effort on the part of HECO (Hawaii Electric Company) to halt the incursion into its monopoly?  Another example of right-wing extremists’ disinformation against the solar industry?  Who knows.  What is certain is that distributed generation will soon uproot the traditional utility model; it’s inevitable, and it’s very good news for humankind overall. 

Some people look at the utilities as enemies of progress, and there is a certain truth to that.  But shouldn’t we expect them to behave that way?  In fact, we commanded them to act that way; they’re only doing what we asked them to do: provide us reliable, inexpensive power.   This was the task we handed them 100 years ago, and they’ve done a very good job at delivering on their promise.

Now it’s time to change the task.  Is that such a strange concept, after a full century of technological progress and environmental change?

Here’s a Christmas wish:  We want our utilities to put us on a course for clean energy.  That will require, as expeditiously as possible, decommissioning coal plants, bringing on utility-scale renewables, energy storage, smart-grid, and support the transition to electric transportation — all the while accommodating the trend to distributed generation.  If this costs more than we’re used to paying, we can talk about that.  But keep in mind that getting there will create a huge number of new jobs, increasing the tax basis enormously, so let’s include that idea in the calculus.

The time for finger-pointing is behind us.  Welcome to 2014.  Let’s make it a turning point, and make sure this year is remembered as the one in which we rethought our relationship with our utilities.