AMI Services Solutions for Deregulated Markets

I posted the follwing comment to the article AMI Services Solutions for Alberta’s Deregulated Market, by Nick Clark, Managing Partner, UTILITYnet.

Beautiful article Nick.

Deregulation on a piecemeal basis leads to the outcome you are pointing out. Transmission and distribution is fractured; the customer interface is fractured; the value chain is fractured. I suggest that ADOE (and other energy departments) retain a consultant for advise on electricity without price control (EWPC).

The result should be a robust market, where retailers business design innovation (with AMI) should develop the resources on the demand side (with water and gas as well). Reintegration of T&D should assure short run (price elasticity demand response) and long run (boom-bust mitigation) risk managements, with a different standard market structure and design. In simple terms, the End-State of the Electricity Industry.

The benefits of AMI in the new integral-reform-paradigm will be larger than in the fractured-high/volatility-paradigm, as growth and development towards the new economy will result from real creative destruction.

Energy departments worldwide should look closely to the article issues in the making. As electricity deregulation is a very complex subject matter, debate will prove insufficient. There is a need for a generative dialogue that will help see the presence of the emergent solution. I strongly believe EWPC is the way out of those issues.