Reliable, Affordable Power Meets Customer Choice

by Jeremy Elrod, TMEPA

 

For public power utilities, the most important thing is providing power that is both reliable and affordable. Your utility wants to make sure homes and businesses have power when they want it, and they want to provide it at the lowest possible cost. To do so, electric utilities keep up with the newest technologies and trends. 

 

A new factor to deal with in providing reliable and affordable power is distributed generation, which is an all-encompassing term that includes all the new ways electric can be generated. These new means of generation are in stark contrast to the decades-old traditional model of large power plant generating electricity and using large transmission wires and towers to get the electricity to your community. Distributed generation includes solar panels on homes or businesses, large solar projects measured by the acre, small wind turbines, large wind farms with multiple 250+ foot tall wind turbines, backup generators, and several other different ways to generate power closer to where it is used. 

 

These new types of power generation are becoming more popular and more affordable, with more homes and businesses investing in them so they own something that provides some power for them instead of relying for all of their power from their local power company. While they provide power and they save money on their electric bills which pays back their investment, they affect your local power company. Saving customers money on their electric bills is always something a local power company can help with, but the growth of distributed generation means loss of revenue that pays utility workers’ salaries and builds and maintains the electric distribution system like poles, wires and substations. 

 

The distribution system is still needed everywhere, and it costs the same to build no matter how much power is used from it. A solar panel or turbine creates electricity that has to be used immediately, so customers still need to be able to buy power "from the grid" when it’s dark or windless. Battery technology is under development that may one day adequately store this power, but so far they are expensive and aren’t are for prime time yet. Our economy demands reliable, constant electricity, no matter the weather, so a robust distribution system would still be needed even if every house had solar panels on their roofs. 

 

So how is your local power company adapting to this evolving model of generating power? It wants to provide reliable and affordable power while meeting the increasing demand from its customers to have more options and be able to generate power themselves.  Your local power company is stepping up to these new demands, but like most new technology it is still yet to be determined how it will shake out. Regardless, keeping electric service reliable and affordable is still priority number one.