Great overview of what utilities can (and should) do to embrace the new customer-central paradigm in the industry. I appreciated how you framed the trend in this way:

How electric utilities think about servicing their customers has changed dramatically in recent years. Increasing customer demand for more tailored energy solutions, coupled with growth in new product innovations, has created a new commercial environment. This new world will be more competitive than anything utilities have previously experienced. Success will require utilities to embrace the changes reshaping how energy services are delivered. It will also force them to focus more sharply on delivering customer-centric solutions.

I'm curious if you could also comment on what will happen to the utilities that don't focus on these customer-centric solutions? A large majority of customers still don't  have any sort of choice when it comes to their power provider, so what are the downfalls to utilities in regulated markets that don't embrace this type of change? 

Graham - good post, one interesting change in the ERCOT market is that most consumers probably do not directly access their meter data except through their retail electric provider if that provider offers the feature on their system.  Starting in December of 2019, all smart meter data will be available via API's, prevsiouly we could down the data from their web site - but that was painful.  I expect that their will be consurmer friendly Apps to evaluate your data and this could encourage even more change in the market place.  As I posted a couple of weeks ago, consumers can eliminate the middle man with Griddy that charges a fixed fee to buy power at actual wholesale rates.  What you learn there is that the T&D charges are very large piece of our costs - in Centerpoint territory - about $0.037/KWH (plus $5/month)- most of the time higher than the wholesale power price.  

good article...one comment I have--there are really two aspects of getting power to the customer...(1) is the choice of energy supplier the customer selects--whose generation is the customer going to buy?  (2) is the "wires company" that ultimately still delivers the energy to the customer--there is still just one company that has the authority to run the wires through the community to the customer's home.  And that company has the challenge of cost effectively maintaining their infrastructure to contine to reliably keep the power flowing to the homeowner.  The challenge for these delivery companies is to continue to get proper rate relief to cover the costs of maintaining this level of reliablity by properly maintaining their assets.

Graham, Thanks for the post.  I have no doubt that you are right in that the electricity customer will become more sophisticated and utilities will need to be more customer-centric.  This appears to be happening in a big way in the EU.  But, outside of Texas, customer engagement on electricity does not seem to be big in the US today.  There are not a lot of retail choices and it seems we pay as much attention to it as a bi-annual election.  Other than Texas whee regulations are different, where do you see active customer engagement in electricity, either as a consumer or prosumer?