The New York Rev and the Distribution Company of the Future

We live in interesting times in the electricity industry. Vibrant technological dynamism, the very dynamism that has transformed how we work, play, and live, puts increasing pressure on the early-20th-century physical network, regulatory model, and resulting business model of the vertically-integrated distribution utility.

While the utility “death spiral” rhetoric is overblown, these pressures are real. They reflect the extent to which regulatory and organizational institutions, as well as the architecture of the network, are incompatible with a general social objective of not obstructing such innovation. Boosting my innovation-focused claim is the synthesis of relatively new environmental objectives into the policy mix. Innovation, particularly innovation at the distribution edge, is an expression of human creativity that fosters both older economic policy objectives of consumer protection from concentrations of market power and newer environmental policy objectives of a cleaner and prosperous energy future.

But institutions change slowly, especially bureaucratic institutions where decision-makers have a stake in the direction and magnitude of institutional change. Institutional change requires imagination to see a different world as possible, practical vision to see how to get from today’s reality toward that different world, and courage to exercise the leadership and navigate the tough tradeoffs that inevitably arise.

That’s the sense in which the New York Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) proceeding of the New York State Public Service Commission (Greentech) is compelling and encouraging. Launched in spring 2014 with a staff paper, REV is looking squarely at institutional change to align the regulatory framework and the business model of the distribution utility more with these policy objectives and with fostering innovation. As Katherine Tweed summarized the goals in the Greentech Media article linked above,

The report calls for an overhaul of the regulation of the state’s distribution utilities to achieve five policy objectives:

• Increasing customer knowledge and providing tools that support effective management of their total energy bill
• Market animation and leverage of ratepayer contributions
• System-wide efficiency
• Fuel and resource diversity
• System reliability and resiliency

The PSC acknowledges that the current ratemaking procedure simply doesn’t work and that the distribution system is not equipped for the changes coming to the energy market. New York is already a deregulated market in which distribution is separated from generation and there is retail choice for electricity. Although that’s a step beyond many states, it is hardly enough for what’s coming in the market.

Last week the NY PSC issued its first order in the REV proceeding, that the incumbent distribution utilities will serve as distributed system platform providers (DSPPs) and should start planning accordingly. As noted by RTO Insider,

The framework envisions utilities serving a central role in the transition as distributed system platform (DSP) providers, responsible for integrated system planning and grid and market operations.

In most cases, however, utilities will be barred from owning distributed energy resources (DER): demand response, distributed generation, distributed storage and end-use energy efficiency.

The planning function will be reflected in the utilities’ distributed system implementation plan (DSIP), a multi-year forecast proposing capital and operating expenditures to serve the DSP functions and provide third parties the system information they need to plan for market participation.

A platform business model is not a cut and dry thing, though, especially in a regulated industry where the regulatory institutions reinforced and perpetuated a vertically integrated model for over a century (with that model only really modified due to generator technological change in the 1980s leading to generation unbundling). Institutional design and market design, the symbiosis of technology and institutions, will have to be front and center, if the vertically-integrated uni-directional delivery model of the 20th century is to evolve into a distribution facilitator of the 21st century.

In fact, the institutional design issues at stake here have been the focus of my research during my sabbatical, so I hope to have more to add to the discussion based on some of my forthcoming work on the subject.