Restructuring Today quotes Kurt Yeager from COMPETE Coalition conference
In a March 25 Restructuring Today article, Kurt Yeager is quoted talking to COMPETE Coalition conference attendees about the Galvin Electricity Initiative's vision to transform our nation's power system and the need for more innovation from utilities.
View E&ETV's coverage of the COMPETE Coalition conference.
Restructuring Today (March 25, 2010)
Compete Coalition conference reminded why innovation is key
The current system of power industry regulation is ill-suited for driving innovation in the very significant ways needed to address climate change, experts said at a Compete Coalition event yesterday in Washington. Innovation in the industry has been declining, notwithstanding the work at EPRI, with low R&D budgets and little incentive to try new things, said think tank NDN's Green Project Director Michael Moynihan.
Moynihan's report titled "Electricity 2.0" advocates opening up the grid or "network" to two-way communication between customers and suppliers.
That's quite similar to the Galvin Electricity Initiative's vision that seeks for the power industry the same sort of transformation the telecom sector went through in years past.
The power industry is full of pent-up innovation that can tackle problems such as reliability issues that cost $150 billion/year or $100 billion that could be saved with better efficiency, said Galvin Executive Director and former EPRI Chief Kurt Yeager.
"We have a museum piece of a power system," said Yeager. "Not because utilities are bad people in any way but because they have no incentive for innovation." The rules that govern the industry were developed in the '30s when the only goal was to electrify the country and they haven't been adequately updated since, he added.
Every building should be a power plant, not just a power taker but the current regulatory framework doesn't provide for that, said Yeager.
Making buildings into power plants can be accomplished more ways than slapping solar PV on their roofs. A firm called Recycled Energy Development (RED) has systems in place that take waste heat and produce power with it, said the firm's Senior VP Dick Munson. RED is producing 65 mw of power from a silicon production plant in Alloy, WV that boosts efficiency by 20% while cutting greenhouse gases by 485,000 tons/year.
Such projects could mean an end to central station power plants, said Munson. Moynihan and Yeager see the need for power plants going into the future but eventually the industry will adopt a much more decentralized model.
Utilities are moving to the smart grid but while they say they want to include ratepayers in their use more, Yeager sees that as empty rhetoric unless they also open up the network to new players.
Without that, the benefits of the smart grid to the market and the industry could go away from a potential consumer backlash, he added.
Utilities will have a role to play going forward but in future generations they could look very different, said Yeager. AT&T was a monopoly utility and it lost that status yet still does quite well for itself, he noted.
This story has been reproduced from the March 25, 2010 issue of Restructuring Today with the permission of the publisher, GHI LLC. To view the full story on Restructuring Today’s website, please visit http://www.restructuringtoday.com/public/12666.cfm?sd=77.
