Reliability and cybersecurity top the list of concerns rated “very important” by utility executives in Black & Veatch’s 2017 Strategic Directions: Electric Industry Report, released this fall. Reliability, and an aging infrastructure, were behind a heightened focus on investments in T&D among survey respondents in the United States.
Among other concerns are
• Renewable energy assets are behind a surge in merger and acquisition activity aimed at bringing more renewables and distributed energy resources (DER) online. The trend is combined with a swing away from legacy assets such as coal and nuclear.
• The industry is “well aware” of the potential disruption of technologies like energy storage, distributed generation and microgrids, but debate over the scale “remains active.”
• Almost half of respondents plan to add renewable energy sources — 44 percent from solar photovoltaic and 42 percent from wind turbines — to their systems within the next five years.
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