Blockchain is a distributed system of electronic ledgers that provide automatic, instant cross-verification of transactions. With it, bitcoin offered an unsurpassed degree of reliability. Perhaps you think utilities can just wait and adopt bitcoin or cyber-whatever later. But anticipation and precautionary actions are the best course in the face of uncertainty.

Toshiba recently announced that financial write-offs related to its troubled nuclear division, Westinghouse Electric, would total about $6.2 billion dollars. Since the write-off announcements, Toshiba's stock price has been cut in half. Toshiba's financial collapse changes the face of the nuclear industry.

Many public power utilities are taking a closer look at how DER, including electric storage facilities, might benefit their communities. The American Public Power Association has asked that new FERC wholesale market rules not frustrate local use of these evolving resources.

Executives outwardly struggle with the notion that they now need to focus on becoming more visibly innovative. After all, hasn't this been their mission for decades? But it is also why the needed focus of tomorrow's innovation is so different and why a real challenge exists to remove barriers to success.

I want to encourage the research and deployment of technologies that enhance human capabilities and quality of life. But our primary concern is to protect the most vulnerable customers from being excluded.

Exchanging and using information effectively is what interoperability is all about. We often say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the same is true of the interoperability value chain.

U.S. cannabis industry is experiencing explosive growth. The industry is extremely energy-intensive and is already placing strains on some individual utilities and local grids. Here we discuss the implications for utilities and PUCs and explore potential solutions.

Maximizing exposure to regulated assets may not be an optimal long-term investment strategy, despite its present popularity. The factors considered here include lower allowed returns on equity, the law of diminishing returns, declining demand for the product, price increases, and a possible death spiral.

In 1991, Eastern European countries and the former Soviet republics responded to a completely different set of incentives and policy drivers for the development of their utilities. USEA, together with other implementing partners of the agency, was tasked to help change the mentality of folks that worked in these utilities.

Flexibility, electrification, distributed solar, and smart inverters are familiar terms in today's utility environment, but they are of particular relevance to integrated resource planners. EPRI's Mark McGranaghan, Vice President of Distribution and Energy Utilization, touched on these topics, and a few more, in our latest EPRI Unplugged conversation.