Two centuries ago, Baltimore boasted America’s first public gas utility, owing to a new innovation: Delivering the product to street lamps using hollowed-out logs. A century later, the utility added to its mix by offering a new kind of energy: electricity.In this age of ever-faster disruption, the people who run utility companies may, by and large, be the last group of capitalists standing who still believe they’ll never lose their customers.
Those two tech behemoths have garnered a tremendous amount of attention in recent years for their smarthome arms race. Google GOOG, +0.56% GOOGL, +0.52% bought Nest; Amazon AMZN, +0.68% bought Ring; both partnered with home builders to smooth out the introduction of their voice-enabled products into the lives of consumers; and both, as in all their endeavors, are constantly capturing a wide array of data to better serve, and anticipate, those same customer’s needs.
Who else is a customer of Amazon’s? Thanks to its high-margin cloud services business, a number of public and private utilities, all of which are sharing with Amazon valuable data and insights in an effort to improve their own customer service. Knowing full well that, in doing so, they’re also potentially enabling their biggest possible future competitor.
Even industries that don’t see existential threats to their business may consider the transition from mere consumers of energy to companies with energy offerings — Comcast CMCSA, +2.36% and other telecoms already have smarthome offerings and a deep relationship with consumers; the only thing preventing them from offering electric power, too, is the will to spend.
Green Mountain Power in Vermont is an example of a utility trying to help individual consumers, where the small, progressive utility has been offering its customers a subsidized installation of automaker Tesla’s TSLA, +1.29% home battery packs, called Powerwalls, for the very low monthly rate of $15. This battery-storage option gives customers peace of mind if there’s an outage, and gives Green Mountain the opportunity to unlock potential savings by better distributing usage during peak times.
Me86793059 Wouldn't be through greed by any chance?
I am working on HPU = Home Power Units, that will revolutionize electricity! But cannot talk about it!
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Cant wait