Until and unless energy suppliers are required to recover all of their costs from market revenues, customers that cannot or do not want to be flexible will either have to provide subsidies in the form of capacity payments for those customers that are flexible, or they will have to pay for new generation.

Over the last 20 years the value of service has increased for the average residential customer as we replaced gas pilot lights with electric ignitions and have come to depend on computers, other electronics, and the internet. But it would be relatively easy to build frequency response in to refrigeration equipment, dish & clothes washers, etc. If we had the protocols, customers could help avoid blackouts without even noticing the short interruptions of loads that need not run continuously and allow the grid to get back into balance. It could be built into appliances as part of the intelligent grid, without needing the smart meter.

My observation is the opposite of that. People seem to want nicer homes more appliances and therefore more electricity to operate it all. While I am sure these ideas will work to some degree they should never be considered as a replacement for continuing to maintain and buid the existing electrical infrastructure.

We should be starting now to carefully and accurately plan for all the known limits to growth, including planning for what happens when another 3 billion ++ presently non-participating persons decide to join the party.

But do not trivialize a large reduction in the need for peaking power plants. They are extraordinarily expensive per kWh produced and require a massive, expensive, transmission system that is rarely used. Average costs will come down significantly when/if the electric industry becomes efficient by greatly reducing peak generation. Such greater efficiency is the rare opportunity to be good for our wallets and the environment at the same time. Add thermal storage to use night time generation to serve air conditioning loads to the other efficiencies and we will need fewer new plants than you expect. And many of those can be cogeneration, using wasted process heat to additional budget and environmental benefits.

Eventually the U.S. will need additional generation, some of it central generation, and Asia needs a lot now. But we can largely avoid new peakers and that is an accomplishment.