Future of Utilities-Utilities of the Future. How Technological Innovations in Distributed Energy Resources will Reshape the Electricity Power Sector

摘要

In many countries of the world the electric industry is in a phase of fundamental change, caused by power market liberalization, unbundling between regulated and unregulated business, distributed generation, growing shares of renewables, and auto-generation, partly triggered by extensive subsidies. There is a growing need for more flexibility in generation and power load. Climate protection requires efficiency improvements. Information technologies are needed for making all these transformations happen. Declining wholesale prices in some countries represent additional challenges to the traditional generation business, but new business models with promising sustainable profits are still rare, except in the subsidized and regulated parts of the electricity value chain. Governments and regulators are quite active in designing appropriate and socially optimal electricity market models but this process is characterized more by trial and error than by a well-established theory and strategy.