It is easy to get depressed when your business metrics look worse and worse.
Wall Street wants you to show growth and when you measure that as increases in traditional sales metrics, you can lose hope.
This was the case as Thomas Edison’s electric lamp replaced natural gas in home
and street lighting. The gas industry decided that investing in Edison’s was better than simply sitting on the sidelines moping about bad numbers. They got a wonderful outcome of course when Edison had to generate the electricity for those lamps as a fuel for that instead of the lamps themselves.
We are on a stunningly parallel course with the electricity industry today. You would have to be living under a rock not to see how Tesla has changed the Electric Vehicle landscape despite his critics. And, when you read articles like the one shown here, the future is clear … read: Light Bulbs and Electric Cars: A Time for Change.
The key question for electric utilities today is the role they are going to play. Once again, remember the warning of Jim Rogers, past CEO of Duke Power. “If you aren’t at the table, you are on the menu!”