[BETA] Fortnightly

With a road map for planning, utilities can realign organizations, integrate systems, and satisfy stakeholders. The destination: a more resilient grid

The conventional wisdom about utility spending is correct, but key factors affecting customer satisfaction aren't obvious—and are tricky to control.

Data and experience show that serving customers well translates into better rate case outcomes. Conversely, poor performance starts a downward slide. J.D. Power and Associates research shows the correlation between customer service and financial returns.

Regulators and customers are holding utilities’ feet to the fire, when it comes to investing in advanced metering and smart grid systems—and rightly so. Making the most of investments requires a systematic approach to establishing standards and monitoring performance. But it also requires policy frameworks and cost recovery regimes that provide the right incentives.

A rebuttal to conclusions made in three Fortnightly articles that service quality declined in Ontario because of a performance-based regulation plan implementation.

Building upon last month’s installment, more is revealed on how, after 10 years of incentive regulation, reliability has declined in Ontario.

After 10 years of incentive regulation, reliability has declined in Ontario. Regulators failed to enforce service-quality standards, and consumers are suffering as a result.

Sophocles once said, “Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.” Apparently Sophocles did not work in the utility industry. Utilities must make quick decisions every day to maintain a safe and reliable grid. As they have learned, the key to a quick and safe decision is making a well-informed decision. Yet utilities face challenges in providing enough information for their employees and automated systems to make these types of decisions.

Electric utilities are faced with the challenge of managing a range of aging distribution assets that are critical to system reliability. They also are threatened with potentially huge costs as they seek to replace these assets over the coming years to maintain reliability. Making intelligent decisions about asset maintenance and replacement requires accurate information about the failure patterns of these assets over time.

Taming the Wind is a pleasure to read. The article captures just about perfectly the value of forecasting in cost-effectively and reliably integrating wind power, of balancing in large markets, of geographical spread, and more. It also looks at what the future could hold.