by Lewis Milford
7/26/13 HUFF POST – Will electric utilities go the way of black rotary-phones and daily print newspapers, squeezed out by technology innovation, competition, stranded capital costs, and consumers wanting to make their own electric power? If you said yes, you are not alone.

Even electric utility insiders seem to think this might happen, as solar, fuel cells, small wind, and other distributed forms of generation come on-line to displace big, centralized nuclear, gas and coal power plants.

In a publication that got too little attention when it was released in the dark days of this past winter, the electric industry’s trade group, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), issued one of those reports that industries rarely write. Written and paid for by the trade group, but not endorsed by it, it is a remarkable self-analysis. In it, advisers to EEI admitted that the very survival of electric utilities is at stake from the increasing use of distributed generation technologies like solar and energy efficiency programs across the country.

Read the whole article: Huffington Post

Read the report: Disruptive Challenges