By Sam Silerio
I’d like to speak with Jamie Dimon, please. As the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he also oversees the bank’s Infrastructure Investment Fund, which owns El Paso Electric. I would advise him that the electric company of the future should be more like an internet service provider. The energy internet is coming, and it will revolutionize humanity as much as the data internet has over the last 40 years.
Our future electric utility should wire each home and building in its jurisdiction to be able to exchange electricity with each other. Individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies could produce (with solar panels) and store (in electric vehicle fleets and home batteries) their own electricity, and then exchange it over the utility’s network platform.
This utility could then charge a 1% transaction fee for every transfer of electricity, and profit in a new way altogether. This platform would support our commerce. Electricity is even poised to perform better as a currency than any form of crypto has to date. The fair market value of a kilowatt-hour would be determined by supply, demand, and competition.
We will soon be able to share electricity as easily as we can send money with the push of a button on our phones today. Can you picture it?
Instead, El Paso Electric’s plan for our city in the 2020s is to build four new petro power plants to supply our city’s rising demand. The utility is subsidized by Texas for the construction of their new assets, and it then turns to the people of El Paso to pay them back for their “investment.”
All the while, El Paso’s air quality continues to be trashed by the utility for decades to come, and our electric bills continue to artificially rise.
We don’t need massive petro power plants to meet our rising demand. The utility should incentivize us all to install solar and batteries on our properties to decentralize the grid and advance this new internet.
Virtual power plant programs compensate volunteers (at fair market value) for some, or all, of their battery capacity to be aggregated and made into a deployable asset for the utility to rely on during peak demand times. VPPs show tremendous promise after their successful deployment in Puerto Rico to prevent power outages during the intensifying hurricane seasons.
This future utility should still maintain its own power generation capacity, but it would obviously be a much smaller operation than is currently required with their monopoly status.
Did you know John Pierpont (JP) Morgan was the first American with electricity in his private home? He was heavily involved in stringing the first neighborhood grids together and electrifying America for the first time.
It’s time now for his namesake bank and its portfolio of influence (including El Paso Electric) to steward that legacy of energy innovation into the future.
Sam Silerio is a 2024 Woody and Gayle Hunt-Aspen Fellow and the owner operator of the local solar installer Sunshine City in El Paso. He is an Army veteran, UTEP alumnus and Texas-licensed attorney.
The post Opinion: JP Morgan should encourage El Paso Electric to innovate appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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