Business & Money
Sticking to the Knitting:
A review of three years of post-Enron stock performance by electric utilities.
Immediately following the Enron collapse, investors dumped the stock of any electric power company that appeared to be pursuing non-traditional growth strategies. Any company that emphasized unregulated businesses-investments in overseas assets, merchant power plant development, and energy marketing and trading-was suspect.
Technology Corridor
Mobile workers provide the next opportunity for utility productivity gains.
Field workers at many electric, gas, and water utilities have not realized the benefits of their company's substantial investments in office-based information technology (IT) systems for work and asset management, customer service and billing, geographic information systems, mobile technologies, or even e-mail.
SPECIAL SERIES Part 3
Energy Risk & Markets
Default Retail Supply:
New Jersey's recent basic generation service auction shows how ignoring the many sources of risk can be financially ruinous.
Bidding at last year's basic generation service (BGS) auction in New Jersey was generally found to be extremely aggressive as many merchant energy providers watched in amazement as the bid prices continued to fall during the course of the auction.
The Geopolitical Risks of LNG
To many energy-industry analysts, 2005 is a make-or-break year for the U.S. gas market. If we don't have at least several liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals in construction by the end of the year, the country arguably will face serious gas-supply shortages and price spikes beginning in about 2008.1
Distributed Generation
In the first of three articles, experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory examine the technical obstacles, deployment, and economic issues surrounding distributed generation.
The existing electric power delivery system is a critical part of this country's economic and societal infrastructure, and proposals to increase the role of distributed energy resources (DER) within this system are welcomed by few in the utility industry.
Metering Supplement
presents a special series of articles that clarifies misconceptions and reviews the progress and pitfalls regarding automated metering technology.
Time and time again, the advancement of new technologies has been misunderstood.
The Oracle of AMR
In search of the top trends in utility automation.
Howard A. Scott, Ph.D., specializes in utility operations technology for Cognyst Consulting. His technical and business experiences include automatic meter reading, telecommunications, project and business management, market research, and software development. He has published numerous articles including an extensive market study of the automatic meter reading industry titled .
Analyzing the conservation effects of demand response programs.
Does demand response increase or decrease overall electricity usage?
Chris King and Dan Delurey
Advanced Meter Reading
Advanced Meter Reading
An executive speaks out.
I think, frankly, that it's those marketing folks who conjure up all the myths about advanced meter reading. Rather than sheepishly admitting that their product is deficient in multiple areas, corporate spinmeisters spin webs of words and images into difficult-to-understand concepts, hoping upon hope they can fool us. They bank on the old adage: tell a lie enough and soon people will begin to believe it.
Mark Leach
Frontlines
Can utility executives find happiness in back-to-basics?
We've read the pitch a number of times in these very pages. Top investment bankers have told us that a "back-to-basics" strategy will never produce a high-enough return to please electric utility stockholders; that the only solution to bridge this "earnings gap" would involve a rash of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) between utilities.
