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(WEB EXCLUSIVE) Much has transpired during the nearly six months following the Great East Japan Earthquake—a 3-minute, magnitude 9.0 temblor that generated a series of tsunami waves as tall as 38.9 meters (130 feet), killed more than 25,000 people, and set off the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

What the summer heat wave, and one utility’s less-than-stellar response, teaches us about communicating with customers.

While the vast power of one form of energy below Earth’s crust (tectonic plate shifts) doomed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan last March, using another form—heat and steam—is getting renewed attention in the wake of the Japanese meltdown.

What’s on the agenda for the utility industry today and into the future? Platts and Capgemini asked the industry leadership in their latest survey. The answers revolve around regulation, finance, and human resources.

Uncertainty about China’s role in world trade and its current monopoly over critical rare earth minerals continues to roil supply chains in energy technology markets. Will the World Trade Organization bring China into the fold, or will China ignore the international forum that it lobbied hard to join several years ago?

The process of handling employee complaints of workplace discrimination or harassment is filled with potentially disastrous pitfalls. Here are some things to avoid.

Employee training is one of the most important human resource functions, and one of the most difficult to manage. But there are some proven ideas to help guide training programs in the work environment.

"Asset health" offers a conceptual path to integrating information technology with operations technology, thereby overcoming the common management problem of "siloed data," according to a recent study by The McDonnell Group.

The rise of shale gas in U.S. energy markets has profound economic implications. It has the potential to transform the existing market and bring opportunities for new markets. But shale gas also raises regulatory challenges and the likelihood of litigation. Here’s an introduction to the issue and a primer on the regulatory and legal ramifications of the shale revolution.

Last summer, an international group of scientists and policy analysts under the auspices of the London School of Economics launched an ambitious effort to reshape the debate over global warming policy in a document known as The Hartwell Paper. This July, a similar group followed up with a new report, titled "Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience and No Regrets,"  which puts the earlier work into a North American context.