utilities

electricity prices

The US shale gas boom has increased the supply of natural gas, which in turn has brought gas prices way down. Since gas is a fuel that runs power plants, its price affects your electric bill – depending on your utility.[read more]

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What will be the disruptive technology that starts the slow erosion of commercial businesses away from traditional electric utilities? What technology will dramatically reshape today’s power grids? Microgrids.[read more]

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I’m all for microgrids, distributed energy resources, and the concept of Transactive Energy to improve grid resiliency. But the Smart Grid and its enabling technologies do not mean the end of electric or gas utilities.[read more]

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Georgia is the third best state for solar energy in the U.S., but ranks 35th in actual solar installs, even though the cost of panels has decreased 33 percent. Georgia's state government aims to change that.[read more]

Niagra Tunnel

The Niagara Tunnel, a massive 41-foot wide, 6.3-mile long tunnel that’s 460 feet below the City of Niagara Falls, Ontario, made its official debut last Thursday. The project is nearly ten years in the making.[read more]

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To understand the scale of the task facing utilities, consider the impact of smart meters. Typically, standard analog meters were read once a month, for a single number representing energy consumed. A digital smart meter, by comparison, might relay a variety of indicators every 15 minutes or more frequent. Those updates pile up fast, to 35,000 per year. If not properly managed, the 3,000-fold increase in data volume could be overwhelming.[read more]

Peter Behr, at ClimateWire, describes the U.S. Department of Energy’s efforts to rework its electric transmission study processes, created in the 2005 Energy Policy Act but stalled by adverse court decisions and political missteps. I’m not so sure that the new approaches will be any better received than the old, but I noticed in the...[read more]

Pennsylvania has one year of experience with deregulation of its electricity markets.  Residential, commercial, and industrial customers can now switch to alternative electricity suppliers in a quest to manage the generation and transmission costs on their electricity bills.  With some suppliers, they can even get energy from...[read more]

Through Smart Grid rollout over decades, the world could bring reliable electricity delivery to more regions, create new economic opportunities, reduce carbon footprint andcreate a more cost-efficient facility for power delivery. But all of those potential benefits,to varying degree, are predicated on enabling an end-to-end system of two-way powerflow in which consumers would not only draw from the grid but also store and feed energy back to it.[read more]

  The view from the NRG suite at Redskins Park The Washington Redskins played with enough energy to send Sunday’s game against the Dallas Cowboys into overtime, but by the time the ‘Skins fell to their sixth consecutive loss, my host at Redskins Park  — David Crane, the chief executive of NRG Energy — had left. Actually, he...[read more]

Two years ago, the Smart Grid industry was debating the pros and cons of different displays to deliver electricity prices, rates of consumption, and current bill amounts. Unfortunately, no one really asked consumers what they preferred, but some visionary entrepreneurs began to eye their own smart phones and ask themselves if people really wanted to get yet another gadget dedicated to a special purpose (providing energy information) when there was such a versatile and available device that could provide the same information.[read more]

Here are the key findings, followed by selected top-line implications. The research, conducted by Market Strategies International August 15-September 6, 2011, consisted of land line and cell phone calls to 1,200 adults aligned with national population parameters. It has a +/- 3.2 percentage point error margin at a confidence level of 95%.[read more]

    Utility companies face significant challenges in the coming years, not least of which is the the need to increase revenues while helping customers reduce their consumption. One trump card they will have is the data from their smart meter rollouts. This will enable them to offer energy services around the data which would...[read more]

We marked a milestone on October 31, 2011 by hitting a human population total of 7 billion. Most of the world’s population lives in cities, and nations have been planning to make them as livable, sustainable, and resource-efficient as possible. For instance, China now has more than 220 cities that number over a million inhabitants. Contrast that to the USA, which has 9 cities and 41 urban counties that reach that mark, or Europe which has 35 such population centers. More than 100 Chinese cities including Beijing and Shanghai have signed on to projects to build smart cities – which leverage Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to build egovernment infrastructures that deliver cost-effective and convenient services to citizens. Smart cities, like Smart Grids, are subsets of the Internet of Things (IoT), and China and Europe have much activity ongoing in forms of policy development, standards development, and actual pilots while the USA lags behind.[read more]

An area of growing concern for rate-payer funded energy efficiency program managers and policymakers is how to reach the small commercial marketplace. As a prototypical “hard-to-reach” customer class, the small commercial market presents significant challenges for energy efficiency programs.[read more]