Utility Business Customers’ Satisfaction Drops 10 Points
According to J.D. Power and Associates’ 2013 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study, overall customer satisfaction for all electric utility business customers has decreased ten points from 2012. The study shows the average at 647 on a 1,000 point scale and is based on interviews with more than 25,000 businesses that spend at least $250 […]
How Well Were You Prepared for Promised Land?
Dodged a bullet. Whistled past the graveyard. Rolled the dice. Whatever metaphor you prefer, it looks like utility communicators will not get “fracked” by the fast-disappearing Matt Damon film, Promised Land. And that’s good, because it doesn’t appear that utility communicators invested a lot of time or effort preparing for the potential negative PR impact […]
Smart Grid Distribution Control Center and Operations
In the average modern power distribution control center, day-to-day operation of the network focuses on keeping energy flowing to the consumers without interruption. There is only a limited amount of automation due to the limitations of real-time reporting on the current network. The current Operation Technology systems, such as SCADA, DMS, and OMS are mainly […]
From Data to Information: How Technology and Analytics is a Utility Game Changer
Changing the electric grid from the previous analog system to the new “smart” digital system involves massive amounts of data. To put it into perspective, until 2003 the total amount of data generated by the entire world was about five exabytes, which is about 1.25 billion DVDs worth of data. Today, the same amount of […]
Can Demand Response Help Us Achieve 100% Renewable Energy?
The Journal of Power Sources recently published a study that suggested the energy grid can be 99.9% renewable by the year 2030, using a mixture of wind energy, solar energy, advanced energy storage technology, and a standby of fossil fuel. Using a model grid system with the energy potential estimated from weather data samples, the […]
Smart Grid and Economic Development?
As markets for electric meters grow in countries such as China, India, and Brazil, it has come to light that the majority of those meters are not the advanced smart meters that have become a hot topic in the U.S. and Europe, but rather simpler communication meters that feed data only from the residence directly […]
Shale-Gas Output Led Production to Record in 2011, U.S. Says
The U.S. Energy Department released its Natural Gas Annual report recently, which showed that U.S. natural gas production hit an all-time high in 2011 at 28.5 trillion cubic feet. This was primarily thanks to the output from shale deposits. In addition, gross gas output rose 6.2 percent in 2011. The production from shale rose 46 […]
