Distribution


Some US utilities could have weathered Hurricane Sandy better than they did if they had invested in smart grid improvements such as smart-metering, outage management, and distribution management systems, a senior GE official said.

John McDonald, Director of Technical Strategy and Policy Development for GE Digital Energy, said utilities that have not yet installed the technology would have known about outages more quickly, been able to swiftly identify their locations, and been able to assign repair crews more efficiently if they had the enhancements in place. Keep reading →


There are many things you can do to lower your electric bill, but going the extra mile to make your home energy efficient can save you hundreds per month. Here, homeowner Gerald Singleton explains how he was able to reduce his monthly bills, and drastically cut the cost of installing solar paneling to do so. “My heating bill was getting to be $600 a month, because I was running a space heater in my mother’s room 24 hours a day,” says the Flushing, N.Y. resident. “It just was becoming prohibitive to heat the house in the winter.” Keep reading →

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks during debates at the Bundestag over the 2013 federal budget on November 21, 2012 in Berlin, Germany.

As the temperatures begin to dip below freezing in Europe, an unsightly conflict is heating up between clean-energy champion Germany and its pro-nuclear neighbors in Poland and the Czech Republic. Keep reading →


It was stunning to see just how fast Sandy shut down the northeast’s electrical systems, leaving people powerless in more ways than one. The storm’s flip of a switch effect was because our electrical generating systems are so centralized.

Not one to mince words, Governor Cuomo called New York’s electrical system “archaic and obsolete.” “The utility system we have was designed for a different time and for a different place,” he said, it “is a 1950s system. We’re going to have to look at a ground up redesign.” Keep reading →


Solar’s economics are increasingly attractive yet often poorly understood. Does solar have an image problem?

Businesses small and large – but particularly those with high electricity costs – can achieve considerable savings and create long-term price certainty by installing a solar electric system instead of purchasing electricity from their utility. In fact, every business with a minimum of space (for the solar system) and high electricity costs should examine solar’s potential to reduce overhead in the short- and long-term. Keep reading →


Long Island Power Authority, which at one point had 1.1 million customers without power in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, said Wednesday it is close to restoring power to the last 8,000 homes and businesses that can receive power – more than two weeks after the hurricane ravaged the East Coast leaving more than 8 million customers in 21 states in the dark.

But there remain some 38,000 customers in the areas of Long Island that flooded whose homes and businesses need to be checked and/or repaired before they can have their service restored. Consolidated Edison and New Jersey Central Power and Light also have thousands of customers in a similar predicament, according to CNBC. Keep reading →


Solar power reduces electricity prices. As more solar is added to deregulated power grids, power prices fall lower. The secret sauce is the markets.

Deregulated power markets are invisible to many Americans, yet every few minutes they set the price for much of their electric power. There are ten separate power markets currently operating in the North America. According to the ISO/RTO Council, they serve approximately two-thirds of electricity consumers in the United States and more than half of all consumers in Canada. Keep reading →


Data centers are a vital cog in our digital world. As data centers become increasingly important, we need to look at the infrastructure behind them: the electric power grid. The grid is aging infrastructure designed in the 20th century well before the advent of digital services like those provided by data centers – and it’s simply not suited to meet the power demands of data centers.

Data centers depend on a reliable supply of electricity in order to perform 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Today’s electric infrastructure isn’t capable of providing the level of power reliability that data centers require, so these centers spend huge amounts of money on back-up systems in order to protect the facilities from power outages. There is increasing pressure to reduce the costs associated with electric service, however. A recent Gartner report showed that the annual cost to power an 8,000-square-foot data center can hit $1.6 million, and the cost is rising. These costs don’t include expenses associated with building, operating and maintaining back-up systems either. Keep reading →


A year ahead of a global meeting of energy leaders in Daegu, South Korea, the country’s push ahead on smartgrid technology development has been highlighted by a new report from the World Energy Council.

South Korea’s Jeju Island project will be the world’s largest smart grid system of its type when complete, the WEC said in announcing the new report today, one year ahead of the World Energy Congress set for Daegu. Keep reading →

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