The Virtual Utility

The virtual utility (VU) is a flexible collaboration of independent, market-driven entities that provide efficient energy service demanded by consumers without necessarily owning the corresponding assets. The VU becomes a metaphor for lean, flexible electricity production/delivery and flexible, customer-oriented energy service provision. Experience in manufacturing suggests that traditional engineering and accounting-based approaches to valuing radical innovations such as the VU are limited in that they fail to consider the full spectrum of benefits that new technologies may yield when fully exploited in a new production process. The purpose of this book is to identify new areas of research by presenting new academic and practitioner research intended to further our understanding of the strategic, technologically-driven issues confronting the electricity production/distribution process.