January 24, 2017
If there’s one hallmark of the power sector at the beginning of 2017, it’s uncertainty.
At the time of our last trend forecast list in September 2015, the utility industry was already being disrupted: Customer demand for distributed resources and the push for cleaner electricity were reshaping centralized fossil fuel-based grids across the country to accommodate variable renewables and customer-sited resources. Those trends toward a two-way, decarbonized grid are still very much in play at the beginning of 2017. Lower prices for wind and solar energy have seen those resources reach grid parity across much of the nation, and utilities continue to add flexible natural gas generation along with new technologies like energy storage to integrate the intermittent resources coming online.
