Smart Grid

The advent of the Smart Grid will bring a new driver for value creation to the electric power industry: economies of connection. In the future, the Smart Grid may offer our industry improved returns more typical of Internet-based businesses like eBay, Amazon, and Google to replace the diminishing returns typical of traditional “steel in the […]

Managing ongoing threats to power plants’ digital, telecommunications, monitoring, control, and automation systems is no longer just a good idea. It’s an essential element of superior plant operations and now a regulatory requirement as well, thanks to new critical infrastructure protection standards recently approved by FERC.

T&D systems with embedded intelligence have a great future, and they always will. Too many powerful forces—politics, money, and power—remain to be reconciled before consumers and utilities can work together, seamlessly, to reduce electricity demand and eliminate delivery system bottlenecks.

  As the possibility of national climate change legislation increases on Capitol Hill and captures the attention of the electric power community, I am concerned that regulators, legislators, and utility executives will forget the urgency of modernizing the U.S. electricity delivery infrastructure. On the surface, the issues of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and upgrading and […]

The U.S. electric utility industry has long encouraged its customers to get more value from their electricity dollar. Today, the industry—facing volatile costs and mounting concerns about the environment—is coming together to create a new role for energy efficiency—one that enables technology to deliver more value to customers and electric utilities alike. For example, "smart" […]