By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
What Happened: Quartz Media reports that as distributed generation continues to peel off customers from utilities, they
- are increasingly turning to electric vehicles (EVs) as their business-model savior, and
- are designing incentives to get their current customers to purchase them.
SolarWakeup’s View: The charts below are striking fear into the hearts of utilities everywhere – electricity demand is flatter than Interstate 70 through Kansas.
So if you’re a regulated utility that has realized new generation will be hard to justify going forward, where do you turn to keep growing the ratebase? For many utilities, that life extension may come in the form of EVs.
Sure, it’s a loss leader – like selling a printer so
customers have to buy the ink, or selling an ant job to get the termite business (termites are where the money is, baby) – but the utilities must figure out a way to grow electricity demand. Otherwise, their raison d’etre and, along with it, the millions of dollars of profits.
Since it may be the only way to save the utilities’ historical business model, look for more utilities to get into this game soon.
More
Utilities are paying their customers to buy electric vehicles (Quartz)
After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat. Utilities are freaking out. (Vox)