Isn’t it strange that your energy bills keep rising even though the quality of our energy infrastructure is not improving? Yes, it is, especially considering that a staggering $55 billion is invested annually into electric utilities a year. The problem is that money is flowing to old-school infrastructure that isn’t reducing carbon emissions anywhere close to the pace we need to deal with climate change. Unfortunately, we can’t be surprised that we have a grid that is expensive and relies on traditional technology: utilities typically earn a guaranteed return on assets they own. They are paid for how much capital they spend, not for its efficiency.

For the solution to this backward problem, we need to look to New York City, which is actively working to weaken this backward link between investment and earnings by creating incentives that align utility spending with customer interests. One powerful example of this is so-called non-wires solutions (NWS)—portfolios of resources such as rooftop solar, battery storage, energy storage. In many cases, it turns out that the needs of our aging grid can be reliably addressed by NWS instead of traditional utility-owned “wires-and-poles” type infrastructure—often at a fraction of the cost. By connecting and working with customer-owned infrastructure, utilities can earn money through energy savings while customers are rewarded for their clean energy technologies.

Alright, we understand that this may be a lot of technical know-how to follow, but the important thing to know is New York City is fighting to cut customer costs with clean energy and smart technology. For more on this, takes a look at the full story from our friends over at GreenBiz.