Pure Energy—Navigant's Jan Vrins Talks Disruption and a Rapidly Changing Utilities Landscape

The utilities industry is rapidly changing. New technologies, increased affordability of renewable energy options and even entirely new business models…

| August 07, 2017

The utilities industry is rapidly changing. New technologies, increased affordability of renewable energy options and even entirely new business models have resulted in major disruption across the industry. Large utility companies all over the world are suddenly finding themselves with shrinking market cap and devalued assets and are looking for ways to make up for this accelerating revenue shortfall. Navigant just released its report on the future of the energy industry, and Consulting recently caught up with Jan Vrins, Navigant's Global Energy Practice Lead, to talk about this disruption and the role consultants will play in the rapidly changing utilities landscape.

Consulting: What are some of the biggest changes the utility industry is undergoing?

Vrins: We have visualized the utilities industry transformation into something we call "the energy cloud", where we clearly see the traditional utility industry model transitioning from large centralized power generation, transmission, distribution and delivering the power, to a model where there's a lot more of what we call "distributed energy resources." There are two-way power flows where consumers produce their own power, whether residential clients through rooftop solar or large commercial and industrial customers through generation, which really changes the complete system from a technical, operational as well as financial perspective. Within the energy cloud there are two-way power flows, a lot more distributed energy resources like microgrids and distributed generation and storage. It really changes the dynamics of the electric infrastructure as well as the financials. When I start to produce my own power as a customer and I can sell it back to the grid, that changes the dynamics quite a bit.

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