The first anecdote I heard on the floor at October’s Solar Power International (SPI) conference in Las Vegas was that you don’t see any solar panels on the roofs when flying in. They must not have flown over the Mandalay Bay building.

More striking was the presence of utilities at the conference. The sessions at SPI were particularly utility heavy. Even when they were not physically on the dais, they were there in PowerPoint spirit - or in the audience. One show of hands at a panel on pricing grid-connected storage was split evenly between project developers and utility representatives.

Solar power penetration has reached the point in the U.S. where utilities are going to come into play at almost every level, from design through interconnection and rate design. Certainly, when the utilities were not speaking, they were being spoken about.

One of the more interesting propositions I heard came from James Tong, vice president of strategy and finance at Clean Power Finance, on a panel discussing utility involvement with distributed generation (DG) solar transactions. The topic on the table was how utilities could adapt to the changing landscape.

Tong proposed that utilities could take a page out of Apple’s playbook and focus on hardware. Although it produces some software, notably operating systems and key products like iTunes, it is really in the applications-enabling business through its App Store. By creating a marketplace for third-party software providers, Apple builds demand for its hardware products. Everybody makes money.

The corollary for the energy industry would be for utilities to build demand for their hardware infrastructure by creating a marketplace for energy providers that deliver electricity to customers over the grid.

I’m not entirely sure if this isn’t more of a fond wish than a realistic proposition. Wouldn’t it be nice if the utilities got out of the electricity business and contented themselves with building and maintaining grid infrastructure? This way, the energy providers - including DG solar - could market electrons on a level playing field. Perhaps. The utility representatives on the panel seemed dubious.

It is often remarked that the solar sector is proceeding on a pathway traveled by the telecoms industry in the 1980s and ‘90s. The interesting thing about the breakup of AT&T is that it produced Regional Bell Operating Companies, some of which went on to become strong applications peddlers in their own right. S