Insight into electric utility business models for high-share renewables and storage integration

Since a few years, energy utilities are facing business model disruptions: grid parity of renewable technologies, stable or decreasing demand - especially in the EU -, acceleration of digital innovations within the smart-home market, uncertain policy directives and influential customers' opinions. If, in the past, the lack of entrepreneurial culture within large companies has caused losses of market shares towards smaller, innovative, more digitally mature companies or energy co-operatives, since the last 2-4 years, some utilities have been exploring pathways to fit the energy services demand of customers, in parallel to the requirements from investors and regulators. In this investigation, after a summary of the current status of the energy transition in the EU, emerging business models for the future utility are presented, in a tentative of drawing an updated overview of the current market mutations. The emerging role of the electric energy storage systems within the studied business models is detailed, including the illustration of specific pilot cases, for which technical and economic information are compared