CIS

Cyber Attack! - Defining 'Critical Assets'

ERCOT utilities approach CIP compliance from varying perspectives

As proposed by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the new critical infrastructure protection (CIP) standards charge utilities with identifying their own critical assets and related cyber systems. This approach allows great flexibility for utilities to apply the CIP standards to their particular situations. This will help ensure that their efforts focus on securing critical assets, rather than on complying with an overly prescriptive set of mandates that might or might not yield a secure grid.

Setting the Standard

NERC’s new cyber security rules may minimize cost of compliance, but they leave utilities guessing on how to identify risks.

Liam Baker, vice president for regulatory affairs at US Power Generating, questions whether his company’s power plants and control systems in New York and Massachusetts must comply with the electric industry’s new mandatory standards for cyber security. Baker voiced his doubts in written comments he filed in October with FERC.

Letters to the Editor

Before the hearings started, I felt the number of critical cyber assets for a medium size utility would be on the order of several thousand, not 20 as some major utilities are identifying under the CIP standards. This should be a red flag for the industry.

Customer Care: Microsoft Moves In

Systems heavyweight broadens its industry footprint.

With utilities anticipating heavy rate increases in the near future, they can ill afford to alienate their customers. At the very least, they need to equip themselves to face an upsurge in customer queries and billing questions, as ratepayers come to grips with the new reality.

Infrastructure Development: Avoiding the Next Debacle

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.

Workforce Automation: Where Rubber Meets Road

The purpose of utility-system automation, in a nutshell, is to bring utility service into the 21st century. These advancements will help improve customer service by allowing utilities to respond sooner to situations that cause outages—but only if workforce processes make use of the intelligence these new systems provide.

CIS: Middleware Mashup: Smart Grid and the Back Office

Utilities are learning how smart-grid data will interface with CIS and other back-office systems. Meters and middleware are rapidly evolving in this brave new world.

The manager of technology services for Phoenix-based Salt River Project (SRP) is tasked with implementing a revolutionary process for one of the most progressive public power utilities in the country. Specifically, he is working to integrate data from SRP’s smart meters (140,000 and counting) into the utility’s back-office processes—particularly customer service and billing.

M&A Value Creation: Combating the "Winner's Curse"

Significant value waits to be unlocked through consolidation, but conventional approaches have been inadequate.

Can consolidation create sustainable long-term value, or will it prove seductive but, ultimately, disappointing to shareholders, employees, customers, and management alike?

The New Art of Plant Acquisition

Forget the mega merger as a means to acquire new power plants. FERC’s new rules may offer a better path.

Forget the mega merger as a means to acquire new power plants. FERC’s new rules may offer a better path.