Portrait of a DG-Dominated World in Electricity Infrastructure [Viewpoint

Abstract

For over a century, utilities have supplied electricity to power-hungry world economies. This supply in the western hemisphere has come mostly from large utility companies, whose rates were set in a regulatory environment to match their costs plus a fair return on invested capital. This massive and critically important infrastructure, which has been called the greatest government-sanctioned monopoly, has been slowly but surely opened to competition by distributed generation (DG) resulting from the restructuring of the electricity market. This restructuring has given consumers the discretion to choose electricity providers in much the same way they choose telephone carriers. The shift from centralized to distributed systems was generally recognized as the introduction to independent power producers and the beginning of competitive electricity markets, which allowed distributed units to partake in electricity delivery. The advent of renewable energy promoted the use of distributed systems and DGs. In this DG environment, the traditional electricity industry is undergoing a major change in the way it delivers electricity to millions of households and businesses.