News & Blog

UVIG might seem an odd outlet for a blog post on retail electricity pricing. But the growing disconnect between retail and wholesale prices has important implications for where we get our renewable power from in the future. Germany’s residential customers and my son in Southern California Edison’s service territory face the same marginal retail rate…

The electric utility industry is undergoing a transformation from the traditional utility model (operating large base load power stations and supplying electricity to a captive customer base) to one that faces challenges due to increasing customer choice, cheap natural gas, falling prices for renewables and energy storage, and the need for grid resiliency to withstand…

Many of us have been having a lot of fun thinking about what it will really take to move to a 100% renewable power system. “100% renewable” means one thing when considering reliably running the grid, and something rather different when contemplating altering one’s carbon footprint and other societal outcomes. In discussion of the latter:…

Utilities are faced with making decisions on how to consider this growing penetration of distributed energy resources (DER). The result is a new set of challenges for planning and operating the grid, especially on the distribution system that serves these new resources. With this change in mind, utilities across the country are beginning to look…

Hawaii continues to be a hotbed of solar activity with high penetrations of distributed, customer-sited installations.  As in California and Arizona, Hawaiian utilities are already contending with some of the highest levels of distributed generation in the nation with over 17% of utility customers with installed or approved  PV systems.  Further renewable momentum and PV…