Technology advances and declining costs for both rooftop solar and energy storage are the conditions for the perfect storm that will soon make utilities obsolete, according to the new report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an influential energy policy think tank. “New customers will find solar-plus-battery systems configurations most economic in three of our [five studied] geographies within the next 10-15 years,” says the report. This is not to say that people will disconnect from the grid, if only because of the lure of selling energy back to the grid and the need for a back-up plan. There’s no denying, however, that decentralized solar is emancipating consumers from the traditional power behemoths, lowering their energy bills and creating redundancies that make the overall grid more reliable. Add to it emerging peer-to-peer energy sharing models that put rooftop solar within everyone’s reach, and Internet of Things technologies that will help better synchronized those decentralized operations to the main grid, and things are looking up.
Trend towards consumers’ energy self-sufficiency is about to disrupt the utility model
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