Regulated Utilities Deliver Innovative Home Construction Solutions

In a recent blog, I discussed how a new virtual net metering product is saving residential customers money by going solar with no money down while also retaining customers and reducing sales overhead for the energy service provider. This kind of creative, customer-focused solution is the focus of my new Utility Customer Solutions Research Service.

Utilities Are Rolling out Creative Solutions

The announcement of the Southern Company Smart Neighborhoods initiatives with Alabama Power and Georgia Power is showing that creative customer solutions can have utility benefits within a regulated utility jurisdiction as well. These Smart Neighborhood initiatives are featured, among others, in my recently released Guidehouse Insights Strategy Insight report on these solutions.

In Birmingham, Alabama Power is now providing distributed energy resources (DER) including solar PV and battery energy storage, as well as smart home appliances and technologies as part of a new home construction development. This initiative will also aggregate renewable generation and distributed energy storage at the neighborhood level through community scale storage, solar PV, and emergency distributed generation to optimize the local grid and improve resiliency.

In Atlanta, Georgia Power is also providing DER (rooftop solar PV and battery energy storage), enhanced home insulation, advanced HVAC units, and LED lighting, as well as home automation systems with smart thermostats, smart locks, and voice control technology as part of a new home construction development. The Georgia Power program will collect data from the DER, HVAC systems, heat pump water heaters, and other technologies to inform grid optimization and new services for customers.

What Should We Expect in the Evolving Market?

Guidehouse Insights anticipates that both regulated utilities and deregulated energy service companies will be increasingly more focused on these new solutions and business models to meet new utility customer expectations. For deregulated energy services companies, the reason is quite simple—the sale of electricity in retail choice is being commoditized, which reduces margins. Therefore, the drive to deliver new services without customer expenditures under longer contracts and recurring revenue is obvious. And there are few regulatory barriers to doing so.

But regulated utilities face regulatory constraints on what the utility can do beside operate the grid and sell electricity to customers, making the path to new business models more difficult. However, these two Southern Company Smart Neighborhood initiatives are extending the role a home can play in transitioning the grid from traditional centralized generation to part of an Energy Cloud platform while also creating new residential customer solutions.