State and federal incentives push utilities to invest in grid intelligence.
State and federal incentives provide the carrot for utilities to invest in grid intelligence. But regulatory and technological incentives are not enough without customer participation. Smart-grid policies will succeed only by focusing on customer needs and benefits.
Revealing the true story on smart grid development.
I’ve worked hard over my career to maintain good relationships with public relations people. It’s not always easy. Too often PR people push me to publish things that might be important to their clients, but just don’t fit into the magazine’s mission or serve its readers. But what’s worse is when PR people try to keep an important story out of the magazine.
Simulation modeling can improve O&M and capital-planning processes.
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.
Process changes prepare ComEd to recover quickly from disastrous storm and flood.
Sometimes a bad storm provides the best training ground for a truly terrible storm. An outage in 2006 taught ComEd lessons that helped it recover quickly from the floods of 2007.
New gas projects help globalize the U.S. market.
Underground storage allows gas users and traders to hedge against price volatility. Building more capacity will help North America fully integrate into global gas markets.
Fiber optic lines expose grid companies to class action lawsuits.
Property owners are banding together and filing class-action lawsuits against transmission owners who sell dark-fiber capacity on their rights of way. Utilities have strong arguments against demands for hefty compensation.
Recent electricity pricing argues for faster, more extensive deregulation.
Was restructuring a success? Prices provide a dispassionate analysis, showing that restructuring was poorly designed, badly executed, and focused on the wrong part of the grid. With those lessons learned, it’s time to explore ways to move forward.
The 2005 Act, designed to streamline projects, may fall short of that goal.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was supposed to streamline the siting process and provide a federal “trump card” for projects delayed at the local level, but it is far from clear whether these goals have been, or will be, achieved.
How to ensure another Chunnel, WPPS, or Big Dig doesn’t happen to you.
New generation projects face intense financial, regulatory, legal, and political scrutiny. To meet their communities’ power-supply needs with environmental sensitivity and fiscal prudence will require a new level of managerial excellence that some may not be able to achieve.
Intermittent and interruptible resources increasingly are being considered in regional resource adequacy calculations—but the approaches differ.
While both NERC and the NERC regional councils (known today as the Electric Reliability Organization) have standards and guidelines for resource adequacy and system reliability, much of the specificity as to how interruptible (e.g., demand-side) and intermittent resources (e.g., wind) are included is left up to the individual ISO/RTOs, states, provinces, etc. In fact, the various regions across North America each seem to have their own methodology for incorporating these resources into their resource adequacy and reserve-margin calculations. As the North American energy industry escalates its desire to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through the expanded use of demand-side resources and intermittent renewables, the importance of this topic also will escalate.