What monopoly embraces change? Only companies that are beleaguered embrace change. This even applies to petroleum conglomerates and the now mighty Apple computer. (The latter became overconfident, then faltered, innovated, then innovated to cannibalize itself, now is going through another cycle.) It applied to Microsoft and IBM in days when they seemed eternal and invincible.
(Apple was never a monopoly, which is my point!)
Ones that are well-regulated?[0] Personal experience with this includes the electric utility where I used to live which was proactive in building an open fiber network using their existing conduits, and the effective land-line phone monopoly here which has been at the forefront of wiring everyone with increasingly high-speed fiber when they could just as well have gouged everyone with horrible DSL (there's barely any cable TV here to compete on data).
[0] well as in "in a good way", not "very"
Erm, why didn't you make appropriate investments in infrastructure?
Because it cost money. Why should you expect someone else to make an unprofitable venture if you yourself were unwilling to do so?
In any case, the variability in solar and wind is known. To keep the same level of electrical service will require a HUGE increase in energy storage.
The thing about coal / gas / even nuclear to some degree... you can "turn it off" if there's too much power being pumped into the grid... and you can "turn it back on" if there isn't enough power. That's why natural gas "Peaker Plants" continue to be built, despite the fact that they're much more expensive than Solar or Wind.
The enemy of "Peaker Plants" is cheap energy storage. Coal and Nuclear power is more efficient if you just keep it on 100% of the time and then store the energy anyway.
And believe me, utility companies HAVE been building cheap energy storage. They're called Pumped Hydro for the most part. Other solutions for cheap energy storage simply didn't exist until recently. Lithium Batteries are expensive and don't provide much storage believe it or not... not on the Gigawatt scale needed to last more than a few minutes.
We will likely continue to use "Peaker plants" for the near term, at least until the energy storage issue is solved with something much much cheaper.
> We have the technology to help mitigate renewable variability and could deploy it if we wanted to.
Then build a company if you think its so easy. From my view: its clear that there are risks entailed and that the technology is far too expensive for widescale deployment.
But its a free country. If you really think that building a Lithium Ion energy-storage plant is free money, then build a Lithium Ion energy-storage center. There's no reason to blame other people for not seeing the world the same way as you.
EDIT: If building such companies isn't in your interest, then buy stocks in those companies that are working on energy storage. Like buy stock in ABB or something. Or maybe TSLA if you really think their Lithium Ion technology really is taking over the electric grid.
https://www.dominionresources.com/library/domcom/pdfs/electr...
Or you can invest into companies that compete against Dominion / etc. etc. that focus more on renewables.
Secondly you can invest your pension in ethical, and eco companies. Again, they often outperform others (mine has anyway).
Thirdly, you can live in a place which does not waste power. Or you can at least do quite a bit to reduce energy usage yourself.
Get a bike. You'll live longer, look better, and you'll not kill people with your pollution. Ya! for not being a murderer. Share a cargo bike so you can carry heavy things.
All things which normal people not wanting to take on utility scale investments and risks. Look at your outgoing expenses and see how you can select the providers. When millions of people do it, it has a very powerful effect.
Convince your city to also purchase renewable power. As an example, in Melbourne they used the purchasing power of their electric trams. They tendered out for a new renewable power plant to provide the power. With many urban people often voting 'Green', this is not a really hard thing to do or get support for.
Good luck!
Not an option in all states. But yes, this is an option for me that I've been considering. This strategy relies on the local municipal (or state) government on "deregulating" the utility companies. And also on the government to force the utility companies to buy energy from a variety of sources.
There's a lot of "political infrastructure", laws, deals, and agreements, that are needed to make such options a possibility. And it will do good to remember that the "option to buy renewable" isn't an option in many states.
From my experience, its "grassroot" old guys who just don't like the new "color" of LEDs. True, LEDs were invented decades ago, but the "proper color" ("Warm White") wasn't really available until recently.
Now that LEDs are the proper color for internal homes, people are beginning to use them. They're still far more expensive than incandescent bulbs, so a lot of people (who don't run the calcs on their electricity bill) still prefer the older bulbs.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw a legitimate complaint about a complex system met with, "Well just reinvent it yourself from the ground up if you're so fucking smart," I'd be a rich man. It is not a constructive suggestion.
AES Energy Storage for example, is building tons of energy storage across America. And you can support them by providing investment dollars.
So yeah, building companies (or at least, helping companies that match your worldview) is quite easy in this Democracy. Instead of complaining about it, you should be elevating AES Energy Storage and other similar companies.
No. I refuse to accept a standard of discourse where one cannot even point out a problem without having already solved it. There are many, many hard problems with complex systems in the world, and no person, much less a complete outsider, can hope even to begin to address more than a very, very small number of them even if they dedicate their life to the task. Saying "fix it or shut up" is asinine.
...
I'm sorry.
In all seriousness though, it's a no-expertise-needed response that's meant to shout down people who are particularly clueless and disconnected. Perhaps we need a substitute response, like calling for an expert on the relevant field to decide whether the person is clueless or not?
If it were my business, I would still be at the mercy of giant incumbent competitors, and any dollar I spent on common infrastructure would benefit them more than me. They could then use that advantage to slowly force me out of the business.
The largest firms have the most to gain from improvements in the industry's infrastructure. So the onus is largely upon them to make such improvements. In many cases, there is only one firm with significant pricing power--the natural monopolist--and everyone else in their territory has to dance to their tune. They're the only ones capable of improving infrastructure, aside from a government.
The pricing power is the only way for a firm to afford projects that are neither profitable nor a competitive advantage. The only point for everyone else in the market to having firms with pricing power is so they can undertake those projects that benefit everyone in the long run.
If you're not going to improve the industry, there is no advantage for everyone else to allow you to remain as the natural monopolist. The logical thing for them to do is to seize your capital by force and transfer it to someone who might do more with it (but might do less).
A natural monopoly does not mean the same firm will always have pricing power, but that the modal situation is that only one firm has it at a time. When natural monopolists are protected as de jure protected monopolies, yes it does prevent redundant investment, but it also puts no competitive pressure on the monopolist to remain the monopolist.
I would guess that electric utilities would make wiser decisions about infrastructure if they were less protected from competition. That introduces the risk that a particular market might not be adequately served in an economic dominance war that wipes out both incumbent and challenger, but I think those crises would be very temporary, and would likely invoke a government intervention less costly than protecting the monopoly in the first place.
If you think that energy storage "makes money", build a small 10MW battery plant to supply a neighborhood or two. Buy electricity when its cheap, sell it when its expensive.
There's no "common infrastructure building" going on here. You own the batteries, and maybe you have to pay the big utility for some power-poles and comply with some basic regulations.
The fact of the matter is: these sorts of infrastructure issues are being solved by the free market all the time. Frequency regulation, long-term energy storage (which really is just ~hours) and such are commonly subcontracted out to smaller companies who own small plants from the big utility companies.
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> I haven't invested in the infrastructure because electricity is not my business.
Then do the next best thing. Buy stock in companies that are doing grid-scale energy storage across this country.
It may be an option in some places, but at present, I think you'd lose money under your current plan in a lot of places, and are unlikely to have neighbor-customers in many of the remainders.
> The largest firms have the most to gain from improvements in the industry's infrastructure. [Large monopolistic firms are] the only ones capable of improving infrastructure, aside from a government.
Under deregulated energy markets in the US, common infrastructure (specifically the transmission grid) is placed under the control of a non-profit Regional Transmission Operator or Independent System Operator. In practice the transmission lines are built and maintained by private for-profit companies, but their profits are fixed by regulation and they have to ask the RTO/ISO for permission to do basically anything.
The point of this restructuring was to break up monopolistic control over the transmission grid so that new, small generation or distribution companies could join the transmission network at a fair hookup cost. Additionally, it helps deal with the issue of who pays/profits from improvements to common infrastructure.
http://www.energysmart.enernoc.com/regulated-and-deregulated...
(Also, utilities are building a lot of heat storage capacity, so that their cogeneration plants can be freely dispatched according to electricity demand, with the district heating function completely decoupled, even on the seasonal scale)
Still not deleted by the new administration! It was near the top of Google results for "electric to hydrogen."
And the kinds of investments the grid needs to move to a majority renewable system are very different from what was needed in the past. Many of the best wind projects, for example, are located out in the middle of nowhere and require large transmission lines to bring them to the places that use the electricity. The distributed nature of solar and wind require more interconnections to bring in power from locations that have an excess of sun or wind to those that need the electricity. It is more difficult to keep these diverse sources of power synced so that the grid transports a steady amount of power at the right frequency, and that also needs more and different investments than in the past.
It's not a simple matter of profit/loss, but of balancing a number of political considerations and a huge bootstrapping problem. I don't think any one company can handle this by itself.
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2014/02/04/utilities...
* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-th...
That is the major thing in their heads currently for solar.
Also since they are monopolies, gov'ts use them as hidden tax vehicles / subsidy givers as part of their monopoly status, which can make it hard to run an actual business. They make money via infrastructure access and selling electricity from power plant assets on the open market, not your specific kw/h power usage.
Most utilities should be thought of as extensions of the government in practice.
That should be free.
Imagine if you could just buy your electricity from one of dozens of providers? That would be great.