Xcel CEO: No Plans to Expand or Duplicate SmartGridCity

By taking a look at the EWPC post "2 Smart Grid Lessons Learned: Increasing Stimulus Grant was Mistaken. Utilities Must be Restructured ( http://bit.ly/EWPC45 ), we should send a very strong message to federal and state governments all over the place.

The Electricity Without Price Controls is about very serious and dedicated research work on the architecture of the emerging power industry. It is about the end of the Mass Market Revolution where oil was the low cost input driver of the old economy, which is being phased out.

What we are seeing is the emergence of the System Revolution, where information and communication technologies are the high value input that drives the new economy. We need to let the creative destruction replace the obsolete business model of the utilities, which run out of steam a long time ago, to enable huge value creation with an architecture competition of business models.

I understand that the best place to start such a revolution is precisely Boulder, Colorado, as " the franchise agreement between Xcel and Boulder expired. The company is now operating under a revocable permit that expires at the end of the year," as Michael Kanellos wrote yesterday on his article "Boulder Prepares to Wash Its Hands of SmartGridCity,” on greentechmedia.com

This suggestion is not at all premature. On the contrary, the utility lobby bypassed the creative destruction of power industry at the beginning of this century, with what I explained in the highly viewed (close to 10,000 hits) 2007 EWPC article "The BIG California LIE ( http://bit.ly/cUEvFN )," whose summary says "

"The BIG LIE is that retail competition is impossible in electric markets. The implementation of a competitive retail market was the center of the debate in California. Instead of cooperating to implement it, the three big California utilities, that didn't care about the end-custumers, acted very irresponsibly. EWPC is the paradigm shift to show that retail competition is not only possible, but absolutely necessary to turn the electricity industry into a vibrant value added business for all stakeholders."

Finally, to respond the question, Who pays?, I propose to use the EWPC-AF to allow payment of all prudent investments on the T&D Grid side and disallow any payment on Enterprise side.