Perspective

PG&E met with firms that responded to its Request for Information, each of which presented their approaches to accomplish this unprecedented project. Herein are key excerpts of the RFI.

As we have experienced the effects of innovation in all aspects of our industry, so too has innovation revolutionized the conversion from “overheading” to undergrounding. Converting selected overhead wires to underground cables has consequently become a compelling option for utilities across the country.

We celebrate this year’s AEIC Top 10 Awards for operational innovation: Commonwealth Edison for advanced distribution protection and for an arc flash simulator, Con Edison for its safety leadership system, Duke Energy for its customer delivery builder concierge, Eversource for its Give Me a Moment tools to address momentary outages, Florida Power & Light for tackling human error in switching, New York Power Authority for private LTE network applications, PPL for vegetation management risk modeling, Tampa Electric for its BlockEnergy distributed energy system, and Tennessee Valley Authority for its safety blitz process.

Leaders from regulatory, reliability, and engineering discuss the path to decarbonization and its calls for renewables and related transmission infrastructure.

Leaders at the DOE’s National Laboratories describe their latest technology projects.

This event focused on R&D in the corporate and government sectors, including national labs and universities.

“OPC will advocate for a market structure that promotes innovative decarbonizing technologies and ensures they are provided cost effectively.”

There are generators who want to get projects built, but they don’t know until very late in the process what it’s actually going to cost to upgrade the associated transmission system.

“Liberalized conditions complicate the state regulators’ job of evaluating whether a proposal to merge a utility is in the public interest and place the responsibility to protect retail customers almost entirely on regulators.”