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What’s Worse for the Smart Grid – Failures of Imagination or Failures of Communication?
The history of innovations, whether these are in technology, policy, or in how people themselves upgrade attitudes or behaviors, offers resounding proof of a basic flaw in arguments that naysayers constantly winge about solar, wind, energy storage...
The Smart Grid – Shifting Paradigms for Consumers
Resiliency. It’s important for people (how well do we survive challenges), cities (how quickly can urban environments rebound from an earthquake or major weather event), and nations (how effectively can a country recover from a widespread...
Can New Market Participants Make the Grid more Resilient?
Back when the light bulb was the killer app of 1879 and the nascent electrical grid was shaped by a series of technological innovations, reliability was the most important metric to structure grid performance expectations. People had...
Smart Grid Technologies Present Challenges to Regulatory Policy
State regulatory commissions have significant impacts on their local economies through oversight of privately-owned electric, natural gas, water, telecommunications, and various transportation entities. The National Association of Regulatory...
What If We Measured Utilities on Uptime Instead of Downtime?
Utilities traditionally focused on engineering the electric grid for reliability, and have well established metrics and benchmarks to gauge their performance to reliability objectives. But today’s grid also has serious vulnerabilities...
Make the Smart Grid Smarter with Grid Resiliency
The most magnificent machine in the world, our national electric grid, is managed and measured for reliability. Reliability is an important objective – we all depend on utilities delivering their best efforts to Keep The Lights On (KTLO)....
Could a Power Outage Become a Teachable Moment About Grid Resiliency?
One hundred and fifty-five thousand meters in ten states are still without power from the grid as a result of storms that occurred at the end of June. The household occupants and business owners relying on these meters sweltered and tallied up...
Think Small to Think Really Big
Before moderating my session at a data analytics conference this past week, I heard an interesting comment from a utility representative about the scalability of data analytics solutions. He recounted that many vendors were pitching solutions...
The Smart Grid’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies
The dust is still settling on the recent United Nation’s Rio+20 environmental summit, and reactions range from disappointment at the lack of national governmental consensus to optimism at the range and success of local governmental and corporate...
Simulating the Sun – Using Analytics to Expand Solar Markets
Installations of solar systems that generate electricity are coming down in price due to materials innovations and manufacturing efficiencies. But it’s been a challenge to wring costs from the part of the value chain that is focused on...
Will a Natural Monopoly Protect Electric Utilities?
There are some striking similarities between the old Bell Telephone system and today’s regulated electric utilities. Both were highly regulated, had similar mission-critical mindsets to deliver electricity or dial tone, and did not have to...
Policy Decisions Make Things Happen for the Smart Grid
There are three types of people in the world, the saying goes. Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened. When it comes to the Smart Grid, this observation applies to businesses and...
