Electric utilities broaden their vision, again, and move beyond energy services...to communications services
- Electric Power Research Institutes, Palo Alto, CA (United States)
Energy production and delivery will be tightly coupled with telecommunications and information services for the foreseeable future. In order to control access to the customer and prevent erosion of their customer bases, utilities will be driven to become more aggressive in deploying both supply-side information technologies for improved operation of their generation, transmission, and distribution facilities; and demand side Energy Information Service (EIS). Those information services will enable utilities to provide higher quality services at lower cost with lower environmental impact, and to give their ratepayers better control over their power usage. Utilities have important assets that will be valuable in deploying telecommunications networks that support EIS and other value-added information services. Electric power utilities have the potential to become significant players in the National Information Infrastructure, providing commercial EIS, non-energy value-added services, and telecommunications services. Utility entry into telecommunications markets would bring more competition to those markets and contribute toward universal service goals. Regulatory restrictions on utility entry into telecommunications markets are inconsistent with more recent government policies promoting competition. Joint ventures and other forms of partnering will be necessary to build utility networks, and partnering with telecommunications companies will be especially important to utilities. Pivotal business alliances and regulatory policies that will shape the business environment for both industries are likely to be decided int the next few years. Utilities face a brief window of necessity and opportunity: the necessity to assess the EIS and telecommunications capabilities they will need to support their core business in the future; and the opportunity to consider what new sources of revenue could be opened up by those capabilities.
- OSTI ID:
- 128967
- Journal Information:
- Cogeneration and Competitive Power Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: Fal 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
How to construct a service quality index in performance based ratemaking
Information technology needs for residential value-added services. Final report