How Utilities Can Do Less and Make More Money
From Energy Changemakers Podcast by Energy Changemakers
June 10, 2026 · 41 min · Season 1 · Episode 49
About this episode
The episode discusses the flaws in the American utility model and proposes a new approach for utilities to earn revenue through decentralized grid coordination.
Electricity prices are rising, data centers are struggling to connect, and consumers are feeling the pinch — yet utilities keep reporting record earnings. What's going wrong, and how do we fix it? In this episode, Elisa Wood speaks with Michael Lee, former CEO of Octopus Energy US and founder of Distributed Grid, about the structural flaw at the heart of the American utility model: an incentive system that rewards building infrastructure regardless of whether it is needed. Lee argues that this cost-of-service model — largely unchanged for a century — is driving an inflationary spiral in electricity rates and blocking the distributed energy resources that could make the grid more affordable and resilient. But his argument is not simply that utilities are bad actors. It is that utilities are rational actors operating under the wrong rules. Change the rules — and the business model — and utilities could earn more revenue by coordinating a decentralized grid than by building poles and wires. Lee lays out a detailed roadmap: from reframing utilities as "network coordinators" to paying them for outcomes (reliability, affordability, speed to power) rather than capital…
People in this episode
Host: Elisa Wood
Guest: Michael Lee
Topics covered
- utility model
- electricity pricing
- decentralized grid
- incentive systems
- energy resources
- business model
Keywords
- utilities
- electricity rates
- cost-of-service model
- grid resilience
- network coordinators
- energy infrastructure
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Octopus Energy US, Distributed Grid
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