Why transmission planners and protection engineers need to work more closely together.
Recent outages show the importance of proper transmission system design. As the grid becomes more complex, reliability requires tighter coordination.
The reliability organization struggles with reforms, as FERC hovers.
NERC’s reliability oversight is bogged down on two fronts—standard-setting and compliance oversight. Progress depends on improving unwieldy process.
The state regulator’s perspective on gas infrastructure inspections and investments.
As aging pipelines bring safety concerns, regulators and utilities must cooperate to ensure investments deliver the greatest value for customers.
Microgrids begin to make economic sense.
Technology is changing the game. Is your utility ready?
Although today microgrids serve a tiny fraction of the market, that share will grow as costs fall. Utilities can benefit if they plan ahead.
Customer satisfaction and electric utilities.
The conventional wisdom about utility spending is correct, but key factors affecting customer satisfaction aren't obvious—and are tricky to control.
ConEd, public safety, and the regulatory response.
Last summer’s union lockout at Consolidated Edison raised novel legal and regulatory questions that remain unresolved. Organized labor can strike, and management can respond, but do state utility commissions have authority to end a lockout that threatens service?
Rising expectations in the Dog Days of summer.
Yet another sweltering summer is causing its share of outages and supply problems, with predictable backlash from customers and policy makers. And with the advances we’ve seen in recent years, perhaps again we should be asking whether we’re adequately focused on our most critical mission: keeping the power on.
IT systems ease the pain of power plant restarts.
Squeezing plant outage duration by days or even weeks can save the industry billions of dollars in lost running time. The San Onofre outage is just the most visible example of what’s at stake for the industry. New outage management technologies and processes allow generators to coordinate outages and get critical plants back online quickly and efficiently.
The regulator’s role in promoting cybersecurity for the smart grid.
State commissions can select from a toolkit of regulatory approaches to promote desired utility cybersecurity behavior. One approach is to allow the industry to selfregulate, and another approach is to leave the job to the federal government. But sofar, neither the industry nor the federal government have developed and implemented adequate standards for securing the smart grid. States can play a constructive role—albeit perhaps not in the form of traditional regulation.