NEW YORK; Nov. 8, 2013 – More than two-thirds of utilities executives believe that the benefits of smart grids and smart meter deployments – which include improved customer service, reliability and outage response – will exceed original industry forecasts, according to a new global survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN). A large majority of executives surveyed (85 percent) also expect the industry’s competitive landscape to change in the next five years, with more new entrants in the areas of energy efficiency and demand response, data services and distributed power generation.