In an article today titled Outages drive smart grid, and muni legislation: Storms + outage anger = muni movement, Phil Carlson of IntelligentUtility connects seemingly disparate events: Boulder's recent election rejecting its IOU, Xcel Energy, moving forward with municipalization, and local outrage over slow restoration of electric service after outages associated with bizarre early winter storms in New England. Rather than arguing between continued IOU ownership and municipalization, whereby a city buys the IOU assets and takes over control, I suggested a middle path in my comment, restated below, under the title, "Municpalization Lite."

The path to municipalization, as Boulder will no doubt discover as it proceeds down that path, will be expensive and complex. Unwinding the investment by IOU in assets required to operate the municipal distribution grid could take years of haggling and in the end, cities and citizens will be stuck with a large debt. The price of independence will be high in that scenario, but no doubt, some communities, like Boulder, will consider it a bargain at any price.

Consider instead a more gradual path to energy independence, whereby city leadership begins to invest in distributed energy resources such as combined heat and power gensets in its office buildings, solar PV panels on its rooftops, EV charging stations in its parking garages, energy efficiency retrofits of its building envelopes and electrical appliances, including spray foam insulation, high efficiency lighting, and high tech HVAC systems. By working with its constiuencies, including economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, neighborhood associations, and school districts, city leadership can expand its influence and reduce local reliance on grid power piecemeal as technology matures, gradually taking more control over their collective energy destiny, while allowing the IOU to do what it does best, operate an efficient distribution grid. And reducing grid consumption - including reducing peak consumption - may do more to get an IOU's attention than anything else.

Rather than look at this as a black and white debate between investor-owned grid and city-owned grid, perhaps we should expand the discussion into a future scenario involving a smart consumer, one that envisions grid-delivered kWhs, on-site kWhs, and negawatts, blended in harmony via a smart grid?