**5. Conclusion**

The key objective of this chapter was to evaluate the viability of the Hamel business model and its application to evaluating the New York's REV vision and the state's path for optimizing distributed energy future and customer choice. The Hamel framework proved to be a valuable analytical business model methodology in this context. The chapter reveals that residential and commercial rooftop solar electricity generation systems is expanding in New York led by behind-the-meter facilities producing power intended for on-site consumption in homes, office facilities, and commercial buildings. Our findings show that New York utilities are increasingly investing in behind-the-meter renewable energy projects. Utilities favor these customer-side projects which recorded the fastest growth in electricity revenues, sales, and customers in 2016 of 89.4, 78.6, and 68.7%, respectively.

The chapter sheds lights on the growing influence of business-model innovations and the New York's REV docket in optimizing utility customer choice management and distribute system planning of electricity services. This research shows that implementation of the REV vision in a polycentric fashion offers significant benefits to all customers, not just those that subscribe to them, by generating richer innovations in pricing plans, consumer choice management, and customer analytics to improve utility operations and customer satisfaction. The expansion of renewable electricity market in New York would be impossible without support from state and federal policymakers. Although key polices and market regulations including community choice aggregation, net metering, clean energy fund, dynamic load management, low income affordability, and utility energy efficiency proposals have been proposed and even in some cases implemented in NYS to improve the development of distributed utilities and services, significant improvement in regulatory and market reforms is still required to eliminate market, financial, and economic barriers and skewed incentives that presently impede the efficient evolution of the utility sector. One of the key market development needs is thus to emphasize heavily improvement in the utilities' business-model innovation through external partnerships and suitable organizational structures that promotes an integrated renewable electricity utility market statewide.
