BC

A Business Case: Energy Efficiency in the New Environment

Investments in energy efficiency can be a growing revenue source. Strong programs, in conjunction with effective monitoring and verification, are the keys to success.

To turn efficiency investments into a growing revenue source, strong programs, in conjunction with effective monitoring and verification, are the keys to success.

CRM and Outsourcing: Inventing the Modern Utility

Developments in IT, outsourcing, customer information and customer relationship systems are challenging long-held notions on essential operations.

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

From Jet Set to Green Set

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

How can utility employees participate in greenhouse-gas reduction?

Gas Executives Forum: The New Downstream Dynamic

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. 

Does the push for liquefied natural gas raise more questions than it answers? Will natural-gas prices level off? Gas executives from Duke Energy, New Jersey Natural Gas, National Grid USA, Sempra Energy, and Southern Co. tackle the most pressing issues.

Utilities and BPL: Betting Against the Odds

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

Broadband over power line (BPL) wants to compete with cable modems and DSL for high-speed Internet customers, but BPL providers can make the technology more attractive by bundling the service with other product offerings.

LICAP and Its Lessons: A Kink in the Curve

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 FERC.

Business Process Outsourcing: Myth or Reality?

ECM

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.

Global Warming: The Gathering Storm

Russia resurrects the Kyoto Protocol and the prospect of either mandatory CO<sup>2</sup> emissions cuts for U.S. utilities, or the start of a global trade war.

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:

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.

Benchmarks

The federal production tax credit and renewable portfolio standards interact in interesting ways.