Ultimate Disruption: The 40-Year Upheaval of the Power Sector
This white paper is in the form of a letter outlining the “ultimate disruption” that has taken place in the power sector in the past several decades.
My elementary school friend Henry was in touch recently. His daughter Sarah is finishing up college and looking for a job. She cares about the planet and he says that she’s heard of virtual power plants and microgrids. Those terms have caught her interest.
Do I have any advice? What options might she explore? Where might she look? Given my career in the power sector, I said that I’d be happy to try to provide her a snapshot of the lay of the land… a sector in the throes of gross upheaval.
We’ve come a long way since Thomas Edison fired up his Pearl Street Station in 1892 at the foot of Manhattan, the first power plant in the world. Gone is a century of vertically integrated, monopoly electric utilities. They’ve been replaced by lots of innovation, distributed generation, choice, and more.
Like the break-up of Ma Bell, the once invincible telephone company, the electric utility sector is now marked by dynamic market entrants and business propositions. They provide a wealth of job possibilities for Sarah. In my letter to Henry, I describe the old utility model and its gray characteristics, the rumbles of change, and the new green models to which she aspires to make a career of contributions.