Utilities increasingly worried about water

Clean-energy advocates will find some bright spots in the latest survey of electric utilities, but they’ll find plenty of causes for concern as well.

The more than 700 US utility leaders who took part in Black & Veatch’s fifth annual Strategic Directions in the Electric Utility Industry survey expect energy and commodity prices to rise significantly over the next five years. They also see water as their top environmental and business concern.

“(T)here is a growing awareness of the nexus of water and energy issue within the industry,” said Rodger Smith, President of Black & Veatch’s management consulting business. “For the first time, water supply has become the top environmental concern among all survey participants and water management was rated as the business issue that could have the greatest impact on the utility industry.”

In the “bad news” column of the survey’s findings:

• Utilities aren’t seeing enough incentives or proper regulations coming from government to encourage them to invest more in new technology.
• They believe smart-grid programs are being hamstrung by “lack of customer interest and knowledge.” True or not, this isn’t great news: either customers really are pushing back on smart-grid improvements (certainly the case with some anti-smart-meter movements) or utilities are taking a “blame the customer” attitude for their own inadequate communications and customer relations efforts.
• More than three-fourths of utilities — 77 percent — see coal remaining key to US energy supplies.
• Utilities see US solar, nuclear and wind industries as being at some risk of losing their competitive positions. More than 80 percent of respondents believe China is the greatest threat to the United States’’overall energy competitiveness
• Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster raised new concerns among US utilities about nuclear fuel disposal and storage.
• More utilities see natural gas as a better “environmentally friendly” energy technology than nuclear or wind power. That view seems ironic, considering utilities’ previously expressed worries about water: the hydrofracking process that’s used to produce shale gas is being blamed for serious aquifer pollution.

The good news column:

• Some 20 percent of the utilities surveyed are planning energy storage projects, and some believe energy storage will have an important role within their systems beyond the next five years.
• Utilities believe electric vehicles will account for around 8 percent of their annual energy load by 2025, and expect plug-in cars to account for 1 percent of their annual energy load by as early as next year.