New developments in IT, outsourcing, customer information systems, and customer relationship management are challenging long held notions about utilities’ essential operations.

Corporate Environmental Programs:

How can utility employees participate in greenhouse-gas reduction? Start with sustainable travel programs.

Of the 5,800 million tons of U.S. CO2 emissions in 2002, power generation accounted for 44 percent and transport for 33 percent, making them the first and second largest contributors, respectively, of such emissions in the country.

Utilities and BPL

Why broadband over power line (BPL) can't stand alone as a high-speed Internet offering.

You could almost feel former FCC Chairman Michael Powell's enthusiasm for broadband over power line (BPL) technology when he called it "the most important third way" to provide broadband to markets across the United States.

Gas Executives Roundtable

Gas distributors tell how their business strategies are changing in response to issues such as higher gas prices, electric M&A, LNG, and gas pipeline development.

Big changes are coming to the U.S. natural gas industry. As upstream developers work to expand capacity for importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), midstream and downstream players are asking questions about how these new resources will affect their businesses.

Commission Watch

LICAP and Its Lessons:

Doubts intensify over New England's radical new market for electric capacity.

What began nearly two years ago as a simple request by power producers to boost their chances for recovering fixed costs for several power plants in Connecticut has mushroomed into the single most complicated case now pending before the Federal Energy Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC).

ECM

Business Process Outsourcing

The utility HR department is the new battleground.

Today information technology (IT) outsourcing contracts are being signed on an almost weekly basis and are rapidly extending into business process outsourcing (BPO) deals covering a whole range of areas-customer care, human resources (HR), finance and accounting, and procurement, to name a few.

Russia resurrects the Kyoto Protocol and the prospect of either mandatory CO² emissions cuts for U.S. utilities, or the start of a global trade war.

In June 2001, the Bush administration withdrew an earlier campaign pledge to support the Kyoto Protocol, claiming that the treaty was fatally flawed in not requiring China and India to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and that the science underpinning the treaty was not yet definitive enough to justify the costs of compliance.¹

People

New Oportunities:

Philip Carroll Jr. returned to ScottishPower as a non-executive director. According to the Comtex News Network, Carroll left ScottishPower earlier in 2003 to assist with the rebuilding of infrastructure in post-war Iraq.

Chesapeake Utilities hired Joe Steinmetz as its director of Internal Audit. Steinmetz served in the same position with Dover Downs Gaming & Entertainment Inc. and Dover Motorsports Inc. from 2001 to 2003 before being promoted to assisted controller.

New Positions:

The Allegheny Energy Inc. board of directors named Florida Power & Light Co. President Paul Evanson its new chairman, replacing the retiring Alan J. Noia. Allegheny's interim president, Jay Pifer, assumed the duties of COO at Allegheny. Evanson had been with Florida Power and Light since 1992. He will be replaced temporarily by Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of FPL Group, until a permanent replacement is found.