Solar will do to utilities what Twitter did to media

Here’s a new graph that we hadn’t seen before until Bloomberg New Energy’s Kobad Bhavnagri presented it at the Australian Solar Council conference in Melbourne on Thursday.

It shows how the business model for traditional media companies was slowly eroded by the arrival of the internet, and finally trashed as the arrival of Twitter in 2006 created a major inflection point.

Bhavnagri said the same thing is likely to happen to the electricity utility business model.  “It took 24 years between the founding of internet and the collapse of revenue,” Bhavnagri noted. That crucial year,  2006, coincided with the founding of Twitter and the emergence of social media as a dominant form.

“One thing for certain is that things are rapidly changing” in the energy market, Bhavnagri said, noting that behind the metre solar PV was virtually unstoppable, echoing the thoughts of many other independent analysts.