Dive Brief:
- Distributed generation may be primed to disrupt the utility industry similar to how Uber and Airbnb disrupting the taxi and vacation rental industries, according Matthew Crosby, manager of the electricity practice at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).
- New peer-to-peer sharing technologies could make the grid more efficient and help smooth out the demand curve, according to Crosby.
- But Crosby cautions that the backbone of the electrical system remains large generation resources and that even peer-to-peer platforms like Uber and Airbnb have yet to do away with the more traditional service models.
Dive Insight:
A host of emerging technologies — distributed generation and storage, smart thermostats and rooftop solar — are poised to become "the front lines of a sharing economy revolution for the grid," Crosby posits. "Shared economy solutions will help to increase asset utilization rates and improve consumer and overall system economics, just as they have for other sectors."
Crosby points out that a Netherlands-based company called Vandebron allows customers to purchase power from the farmer who produces it. And in California, Mosaic is a peer-to-peer solar funding platform.
As new technologies gain wider traction, Crosby says the hurdle will be regulation — the systems in place now are not built to allow this type of shift and "are insufficient to enable the same type of information, payment, and market disruption that spawned the sharing economy."
