A negative unintended consequence of district energy systems

There has been a lot of talk in DC about the creation of dispersed district energy production systems, where sub-districts of the city have their own electric generation plant, using natural gas as the feedstock.  This provides a variety of environmental benefits, reduces energy loss via transmission, etc.

Among other places, district energy plants will be implemented at The Wharf development in Southwest, independently of what might happen in the Southwest DC "Ecodistrict," which has a generating plant owned by the Federal Government (and to service non-federal buildings, laws will have to be changed), in the redevelopment of the Walter Reed Medical Campus in Upper Northwest DC, which already has a power plant, and in the creation of buildings above I-395, between Massachusetts Avenue NW and E Street NE, in the development called Capitol Crossing.

One of the advantages of the electrical infrastructure system is that the costs of adding and maintaining the infrastructure are spread out amongst all of the utility company's customers.  And typically, commercial customers--those most likely to be motivated and have the means to create their own power generation systems are more profitable to service than residential customers.

But the greater the number of commercial customers extracted from the grid, the smaller the number of customers over which infrastructure costs are amortized, increasing the cost of maintaining the infrastructure on the remaining base of customers.

Not to mention that the loss of commercial customers will lead to rate increases for the remaining customer base, in order to maintain profitability for the local utility.