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What does the future hold for electricity providers?
December, 2008: Apparently, conventional electricity providers simply cannot imagine PV competing with them in the immediate future. Otherwise, why didn’t electricity providers, almost without exception, attend PHOTON’s conference on this topic?
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© photon-pictures.com
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David Rubin, from Californian electricity provider Pacific Gas & Electric, was the only representative of his industry on the podium.
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Of course, we can assume they didn’t approve of the conference’s title – but electricity providers have quite thin skins if they avoided the conference in San Francisco simply on account of the event’s title “Traditional electric companies are f*&$#d“ (TECAF). It’s clear that big electricity providers are in big trouble if they don’t take into account the massive amount of modules on the horizon – 29 GW by 2010, and 58 GW by 2012. For some time now, that’s been PHOTON Consulting director Michael Rogol’s opinion. Still, at the conference, he underscored that he was probably the only person in the hall absolutely convinced of this proposition. But even if only half the estimated number of modules above hit the world market: the amount of electricity they produce will have an impact on the business done by electricity providers and producers. Just what that impact will be remains unclear, even in the wake of the conference. David Rubin, from Californian electricity provider Pacific Gas & Electric – who was the only representative of his industry on the podium – could only suggest the possibility of increasing prices for non-solar electricity consumers. But that would only increase PV’s attractiveness, as Michael Rogol explained, and leaves the dilemma unresolved. The question also remains whether electricity providers will choose to partner with system operators – at least that’s the vision of those conference participants that reject the TECAF thesis – or whether PV threatens their business model fundamentally; for example, something along the lines of how the emergence of MP3s overran the music industry.
It becomes even clearer in this context as to what measures must be taken for the grid to be able to accommodate the fluctuations in the amount of PV-produced electricity: it could boil down to mixed operation with other renewable energies, electricity storage, and load management. How to manage this type of electricity grid, and avoid expensive peaks in demand, was demonstrated by Tim Healy from Enernoc, which has contracts to provide North American customers with more than 1,800 MW of electricity, and whose customers remotely restrict use in periods of high electricity prices. These measures become even more important since large amounts of installed PV power will shift the moment when demand at conventional power plants peaks – that is from early afternoon to the evening, as Jürgen Krehnke from SMA USA demonstrated.
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