If the smart grid gets stalled in North America, it may be partly because utility executives are simply too busy with other issues.
Electric power faces unprecedented uncertainty, warned industry leaders during the EUCG Fall Workshop in Indianapolis. EUCG, a global association of utility professionals, meets semiannually to discuss issues and share best practices. Keep reading →
Once an obscure technology, smart grid nearly become a household name this year when the White House announced this June a multi-pronged smart grid strategy.
“Even in today’s information age, many utilities don’t have real-time information about the state of the grid,” the White House said at the time. It lauded two high school girls, Daniela Lapidous & Shreya Indukuri, juniors at the Harker Upper School in San Jose, California who successfully implemented a smart sub-metering system in their school. Keep reading →
As renewable power crowds the electricity grid with growing force, transmission operators are upping the stakes for supportive infrastructure.
On Thursday, Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) announced its annual expansion plan, which included a $5 billion addition to its traditional $1.5 billion annual expansion plan. The additional money will allow the regional transmission operator (RTO) to create an improved “electric grid superhighway” that includes 215 construction projects. Keep reading →
We’re not in 1930 anymore.
The US electric grid of 2030 will confront emergent technology including remote renewables, microgrids and rooftop solar, fleets of electric vehicles and cyber attack threats. Keep reading →
Entergy will divest its transmission business into a newly-formed entity, Mid South TransCo, which will then be merged with ITC Holdings to form the nation’s largest independent transmission company, the companies announced today.
Though the last few decades have seen mergers among power utilities that do everything from generation and transmissions to disaster repair and customer service as they seek operating scale, today’s deal underlines a countervailing trend toward specialization as companies seek investment capital and clearer regulatory signals. Keep reading →
What if you could get all the benefits of advanced metering without buying a single meter or hiring a single person? That’s the proposition put forth by SAIC’s “Smart Grid as a Service.”
The $11 billion, McLean, VA-based contractor provides a wide range of information technology services. It does about 90% of its business with the government and the balance with private industry. SAIC has decades of experience serving the defense industry. That gives it deep expertise in security, large databases and complex event processing. Although not as well-known as some of its competing systems integrators, SAIC also has a lot of energy and utility experience. For instance, SAIC manages a large swatch of Entergy’s operations. Keep reading →
There are lots of reasons to love renewable energy. It’s homegrown and domestically produced. It provides long term stable pricing and is not subject to fluctuating fuel costs. It generates economic development for America’s heartland. It is constant and will never run out. And it’s clean. In order for America to harness the most amount of power from the wind and the sun, a stronger electricity grid is fundamental.
From the winds of the Great Plains to the desert sun of the Southwest, America has vast, untapped potential to generate low-cost renewable power. The Great Plains states – from North Dakota to Texas – possess the strongest wind resource of all developed countries. We have the potential to generate as much electricity annually from domestic renewable resources as the U.S. consumes as a whole – several times over. There is no lack of generation potential. The trick is getting the clean power to market. Keep reading →
Though demand response technology has been around for decades, developers have been working for years to fine tune the system and make energy efficiency programs–such as smart grid communications and automated demand response–more accessible to consumers.
Today, global smart grid company Trilliant released its newest energy software, the Trilliant Consumer-Engagement Solutions, which uses Trilliant’s UnitySuite software, SecureMesh networking and DDX technology to give consumers more and more relevant information regarding personal energy consumption. Keep reading →
Our existing grid is not as reliable as one would expect. What is the cure?
With no warning some 6 million residents across a wide stretch of Southern California, Southwest Arizona and the northern top of Baja California in Mexico lost power on 8 September 2011. It took hours to restore power. Coming a mere 8 years after the much bigger blackout affecting over 50 million people in Northeast US and province of Ontario in Canada in August 2003, it reminded anyone who needed reminding that the US electric grid is not as reliable or dependable as one would expect it to be. Keep reading →
To give you an idea of the magnitude, this storm ranks among the 5 WORST storms of the past 20 yrs in terms of the # of customer outages @PPLElectric
