Burns & McDonnell
Steve Mitnick is President of Lines Up, Inc., Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly, and author of “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
Arguably the unsung heroes of the utilities industry, we have engineers all over North America, planning and building the grid of the future. If you stop for a moment and take a long look at any one of these achievements, you can’t help but stare with wonder.
We do that here. One engineer planning and building gigawatts of wind power generation in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Another couple of engineers planning and building dedicated telecommunications networks to move massive streams of data back and forth to smarten up that future grid.
Is offshore wind becoming a reality at last on our side of the Atlantic? Tony Appleton has a bead on that as much as anyone. Read on to hear his read. Then keep on and check out what Bruce Albright and Matt Olson have to say about the buildout of utility LTE networks. LTE isn’t just that tiny acronym in a corner of your smart phone screen; it’s apparently going to become the nervous system of our industry’s future.
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