Warren,

A common theme in many of my posts to this website over the last year has been that our utility industry cannot afford the massive IT investments let alone fund all the other demands being placed on them today without massive unpalatable rate increases to all customers. If what you claim here is now true, this is even more acute now.

But there is a potential solution as signaled by the election referendum won in Boulder County CO on Nov.4th that will offer low-interest government loans to consumers who want to finance home energy efficiency and conservation upgrades, to be paid back through their property taxes. Both utility companies and consumers could be financed the same way to pay for utility AMI systems and Smart Grids, and pay for consumer in-home technologies such as demand response devices, Home Area Networked equipment, and real-time energy displays that communicate with AMI networks and smart meters. As an extension of this concept, utility companies could commercialize the consumer equipment to those consumers willing to purchase them, and then offer added data services through their AMI systems to those same consumers for an extra monthly fee. The latter approach would be much like CATV and telephone companies already practice, but this would require regulators and governments to change the rules allowing utility companies more freedom to change their business models, and is easier said than done I'm afraid.

William,

Being hired back on contract for less pay and benefits overall, often on a part-time basis, is a standard private-sector method of cost cutting in other mature industries. Too bad they often cut off their noses to spite their own faces. I often what ever happened to the lost art of sales efforts to increase an organization's income, instead of getting caught up in the fashionable "race to the bottom" mentality.

Jose,
Here in Ontario Canada our utility companies are already "wres only" companies, also called "local distribution companies" or local utility companies. Generators in Ontario are separate companies from them. Unfortunately though our local utilities are responible for billing and their business models and our consumer rates are all still tightly regulated.

I believe that consumer rates will continue to regulated to a large extent as they are now if governments feel strongly that real-time prices at the consumer level will never work. Len Gould's IMEUC proposals of course are proposing the opposite, to let all consumers pay real-time wholesale rates. But aside from energy rates, I suggest they should be allowed to make money in other ways besides energy billing, such as in commecializing other data services and technologies to customers willing to buy them as optional services for real-time energy monitoring, demand response, and in-home automation.

Chris: They are anecdotal. I just asked for the numbers from seven utilities spread across the U.S. from the East to the West and some in the middle. They were all IOUs.