What is an Advanced Meter?
The technology behind demand-side response.
If energy legislation requires all utilities to offer demand-response programs, will your company be ready? A review of advanced metering is in order.
Demand-Side Management and Metering Tech: The Ideal Fusion
Combining real-time usage data with the newest technology can earn benefits for utilities.
Bringing together real-time pricing usage information and the newest computing and communication technology can generate extraordinary benefits for utilities.
Energy Customer Management: The Customer as Strategic Asset
Achieving financial returns from increasing customer satisfaction.
Utilities are too oriented around meters and service delivery, rather than around customers. Implementation of customer lifetime value methodology could change that.
Outsourcing, Reliability, and IT: When will the Three Meet?
How to make sure your outsourcing partner works as an extension of your IT organization.
It is imperative that the CIS manager treats the outsourcing partner team as an extension of his own staff. Good working relationships between the client and the on-site partner team go a long way to ensure processes that provide reliability and security are adequately followed.
Business Process Outsourcing: Myth or Reality?
The utility HR department is the new battleground.
The benefits of business process outsourcing go beyond economies of scale, to economy of skills.
Outsourcing & IT as a Strategic Option
Special ECM Section
In this quarterly ECM section, a series of articles in Fortnightly reviews the different outsourcing and IT options that are available and what utilities should consider before adopting outsourcing and IT technologies.
Tapping Distributed Energy Resources
Voltage Regulation: Reactive power is the key to an efficient and reliable grid.
Last year’s blackout was driven, in part, by uncontrolled voltage oscillations, capping several years of voltage collapses among utilities. Are reactive power delivery and dynamic reactive power reserves part of the solution?
A Gas Crisis, or Not?
The conclusions made by the NPC gas study raise more questions than they answer.
The National Petroleum Council’s study on future U.S. gas supplies raises more questions than it answers. Before the industry acts on the study’s recommendations, it should re-examine the study’s many shortcomings.
Gas Supply: Too little, Too late?
Pipeline and LNG terminal developments may arrive too late to prevent a natural gas disaster.
Alaska’s North Slope gas remains in the pipeline, so to speak, despite the efforts of industry heavyweights to bring the stranded resource to the lower-48 states. Meanwhile, LNG development is beset by questions of safety, siting, and permitting, leaving North America with high gas prices and little clarity about future supply.
Energy Storage Systems: A Case Study
How to reduce the cycling costs of conventional generation.
Energy Storage Systems (ESS) can provide significant benefits associated with reduced damage to fossil-fuel power plants if the ESS is used in such as way that it reduces start-ups or load-following/cycling. Though those benefits may not be well known, understood, or documented, they are real and ascertainable.