The three mortal sins of utility regulation are ideology, ignorance and inertia (the three I's). Acting on political beliefs, inadequate information, and past conditions that no longer exist is a recipe for poor regulation.

The water utility industry was featured at the recent NARUC meeting in Washington. It reminded me of a period in the 1990s when interest in investment in the water utility industry was high globally and in the U.S.

There is impressive growth in the types of devices that could play a part in utility and aggregator programs to provide grid support. But there are stranded investment risks if utilities, manufacturers, and consumers make communications interface choices that are not open, standard, and supportive of direct access.

With its roots in the 1970s conservation movement, energy efficiency has grown into a thriving industry today - one that employs many and provides benefits to utilities, consumers, the economy and society in general. According to a recently released report, energy efficiency accounts for about three out of every four American clean energy jobs.

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.