Oracle

AMI’s data explosion will require back-office changes for CIS/billing.

Sophocles once said, “Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.” Apparently Sophocles did not work in the utility industry. Utilities must make quick decisions every day to maintain a safe and reliable grid. As they have learned, the key to a quick and safe decision is making a well-informed decision. Yet utilities face challenges in providing enough information for their employees and automated systems to make these types of decisions.

Uncertainties about smart metering goals are hindering efforts to standardize communications protocols and feature sets. While vendors battle over standards, utilities and policy makers are moving forward anyway—despite the potential for setbacks.

Electric utilities throughout the country are rolling out an assortment of mobile workforce solutions, many of which already are found in other industries. Three mobile workforce solutions recently were implemented at National Grid in Long Island, New York, FirstEnergy in Akron, Ohio, and Idaho Power in Boise, Idaho. Each demonstrates the state of the art in a different slice of the operations pie: power generation, distribution system operations, and customer service.

Pilot projects are bringing the future vision of the grid to life. Whether leveraging existing systems or rebuilding entire networks in a Big Bang rollout, new technology applications suggest an intuitive electrical network may not be far off.

Oracle’s Guerry Waters is one of the country’s leading gurus on smart-meter technology—a business sector with huge potential for addressing today’s environmental problems.

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.

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.

This month’s cover story focuses on how utilities intend to find the talent they’ll need over the next few years to replace all those retiring baby boomers. And part of that puzzle naturally involves executive pay: how to attract the best and brightest without going overboard on rewards for performance.

The Oracle of AMR

In search of the top trends in utility automation.

Howard A. Scott, Ph.D., specializes in utility operations technology for Cognyst Consulting. His technical and business experiences include automatic meter reading, telecommunications, project and business management, market research, and software development. He has published numerous articles including an extensive market study of the automatic meter reading industry titled .