utilities posts, articles, and infographics

Regional Transmission Efforts Good for Re-routing Information Flows to Regulators

January 18, 2012 by Michael Giberson
with 113 views

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]

What Consumers Don’t Know About Electricity Deregulation Can Hurt Them

January 3, 2012 by Christine Hertzog
with 478 views

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]

Toward 2 Way Powerflow on the Smartgrid

December 6, 2011 by Dick DeBlasio
with 252 views

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]

NRG Energy Hopes To Score Big With Solar

November 22, 2011 by Marc Gunther
with 554 views

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]

Getting Consumers to Cross the Smart Grid Chasm

November 21, 2011 by Christine Hertzog
with 233 views

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]

Consumers Deserve A LOT More Info About Smart Grid

November 15, 2011 by Jim Pierobon
with 216 views

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]

How Smartgrid Can Improve Safety For The Elderly

November 11, 2011 by Tom Raftery
with 394 views

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]

Getting Energy Communication Right for 7 Billion People

November 9, 2011 by Christine Hertzog
with 246 views

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]

On The Road to Reachable: Efficiency Policies For Small Commercial

November 5, 2011 by Joel Freehling
with 209 views

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]

Boosting Electricity Reliability and Availability via Microgrids

September 9, 2011 by Dick DeBlasio
with 383 views

In addition to reducing carbon footprint, empowering customers to more cost-efficiently manage their energy usage and fueling new business opportunities, the Smart Grid offers tremendous promise in terms of improving the reliability and availability of electricity service. Increased reliance on “microgrids” is one way how.In a microgrid... [read more]

Can Old Coal Plants Be Replaced With Energy Efficiency?

August 22, 2011 by Neal Elliot
with 428 views

Over the past year, the utility industry has experienced significant angst over pending updates to utility environmental regulations. Of particular concern is the question of whether to invest in plant updates to comply with these regulations or to retire these plants altogether and replace this capacity with new (and most likely... [read more]

The Real Concern about Smart Meters

August 18, 2011 by Christine Hertzog
with 1,090 views

Smart meters can be positively transformative for consumers to control their use of electricity. But there are concerns about them that are threatening to slow down deployments in some areas. That has ramifications to Smart Grid plans everywhere. The three categories of concerns about smart meters are: meter... [read more]

TCASE 14: Assessment of Electricity Generation Costs

August 17, 2011 by Barry Brook
with 704 views

In the previous TCASE post, I considered how various low-carbon energy technologies meet the following criteria: commercial readiness, scalability, dispatchability, fuel constraints, load access, storage requirements, capacity factor and emissions intensity. Here I consider the next issue: cost of deployment, based on expert... [read more]

The Smart Grid’s Cyber-Security Questions

August 3, 2011 by Dick DeBlasio
with 539 views

The stakes are steep. The challenge is nuanced and evolving. And, at this point, there areat least as many as questions as there are answers about how the job should be carriedout.Together, those factors make cyber-security one of the most talked-about topics in theSmart Grid conversation worldwide.In overlaying the electricity-delivery... [read more]

Economics or Politics? Moving Forward with Smart Grid

August 1, 2011 by Anto Budiardjo
with 379 views

As debates and negotiations over the debt ceiling have been consuming congressional leaders, policymakers’ minds are probably far from Smart Grid and the future of our energy systems -- at least right now. But, for the electricity industry, the ways in which the economics of Smart Grid contribute to our long-term energy security and... [read more]