About Social Media Today
Posts by Steven Collier Subscribe 
Was Edison Right After All? Reconsidering DC Power
Perhaps Thomas Edison was right after all. As new technology develops, it's time to ask the question: should be using direct current (DC) instead of alternating current (AC) power? Let’s review how we ended up in an AC-powered world. The preference...
Electrical Grid Woes and the Rise of Edge-Power Players
Increasingly frequent and severe weather events have starkly illuminated weaknesses in the 20th century electric grid. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, problems with the grid go beyond susceptibility to failure during severe weather events. The...
Energy and Extreme Weather: Derechos and Hurricane Sandy
Severe weather events are occurring more often with greater severity resulting in bigger and longer customer power outages. The destruction and associated power outages have caused many homeowners and business people to conclude that their electric...
A Good Offense Is the Best Defense
In my past posts I discussed examples of the transformation of the grid through a revolution in technology that will in turn provide extraordinary benefits for utilities, their customers and society. But, as has been the case in the...
Distributed Smart Metering for Utilities and Their Customers
In my previous blog post I discussed how smart meters will be supplanted by increasingly intelligent electronic devices that will make possible new and better grid monitoring and control. Now I want to discuss the concept of enhanced grid management...
More to Meters Than Meets the Eye
The unrelenting treadmill of Moore’s Law steadily makes electronic components more powerful even as it makes them smaller and more economical. This has revolutionized electronics, telecommunications and information technologies. It will do the same...
Technology transforms the utility business model
In my first two blogs for The Energy Collective I talked about how utilities should deploy automation via sensors and controls on the distribution grid to maximize efficiency and reliability instead of relying solely on customers to stop using...
Automation key to supply and demand
Last month I succeeded in provoking considerable discussion around the notion that the power industry needs to wring efficiencies from the grid, not just hector customers to change their behavior – “rationing,” as one of my colleagues has put it....
‘Energy rationing’ ≠ a smart grid.
Warren Causey, a well-known energy consultant, blogger and colleague of mine, regularly poses the following thought to the power industry. Although it’s a minority view today, I’d like to examine his idea to see where the discussion takes us.To...
