Decarbonization goals driving the growth of renewable generation along with customer demand for distributed energy resources (DER) are reshaping what electric utilities can be.
For the emerging utility of the future, the flexibility of DER will protect reliability and lower customer costs by balancing renewables’ variability, utility representatives and power system analysts said.
Flexible customer demand is moving utilities “from a world where we forecasted demand and scheduled supply to a world where we will forecast supply and schedule demand,” said Mike Hogan, senior advisor to the non-partisan Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP). Utilities can learn to “forecast supply, price energy appropriately, and allow demand to respond to it.”
