Despite several high-profile deals, utilities remain cautious about outsourcing their key business processes.
It seems that "outsourcing" has become a dirty word among utility executives. But though left unsaid in polite conversation, the word is still on everybody's mind. They might even be doing it. They just aren't talking about it.
Does your company measure up?
Few companies achieve sustainable high performance. Markets change but companies fail to adapt, and investors are unforgiving. Utilities, and new entrants, learned this lesson during the first competitive market cycle of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when few companies sustained a high-performance leadership.
Many of the obstacles and strategic issues that utilities face today are all too familiar. This time they must be solved with a different business model.
Exelon Chairman, President, and CEO John W. Rowe, on the proposed merger that would create the largest utility in the United States.
Utilities will gain from new regs for research tax credits.
A 10-year horizon: 2005 - 2015.
Are consumer broadband over powerline (BPL) services enough to make the business case for utilities?
Data gathering and controllability offer the quickest path to reliability.
Technology Corridor
Cyber and Physical Security:
Although NERC and other agencies are helping out, utilities still face internal obstacles.
Operations & Maintenance
The process of calculating meaningful benchmarks is fraught with pitfalls.
Regulatory reporting requirements for major U.S. utilities provide a wealth of data for benchmarking studies. Both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Form 1 for electric utilities and FERC Form 2 for gas utilities involve the reporting of more than 2,500 unique data points per utility per year, across diverse aspects of utility operations, maintenance, and finance.