The McDonnell Group

By Peter Manos

What word comes to mind when you think of an oil-fired power plant?  You’d never expect the answer to be “beautiful."   That is, unless you were me, in the late 1980’s.  I recently dusted off a poem I wrote back then, when I was working as an engineer at Con Edison.  I believed the distinction we make between technology and nature is in our minds.  “Doesn’t everything come from the earth?” I’d ask.

Along with “beautiful,” another word that does not come to mind for most people when talking about fossil-fueled power plants is “efficient.”  But fossil-fired power plants were designed to get as much energy out of the fuel as possible.  For example, after the steam runs through the turbines, it passes through a cascading series of heat exchangers, to pre-heat the water on its way back to the boilers.  Similarly, the hot gasses coming out of the smoke stack pass through a heat exchanger to pre-heat the cooler air going to the boiler.

Was it environmental benevolence that made engineers include these enormous, expensive heat exchangers in their design?  No, it was pure economics. It saves money.

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by Nancy Broe

The energy industry routinely and effectively deals with emergency situations and the power outages and public relations crises they can generate.  Despite this competency, some of the worst public relations disasters in U.S. history have come from the energy sector.

Remember Three Mile Island?  Exxon’s Valdez oil spill?  Enron’s collapse?  BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident?  Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear meltdown?  The smart grid era has not yet experienced a major disaster, but examining the public relations lessons of disasters past can help build trust and reduce consumer anxiety about new technology during ordinary times and improve responsiveness if and when catastrophic events occur.

By Don McDonnell

ATLANTA – June 20, 2011 - For decades the US electric and natural gas industries have engaged in a drawn out version of what the Japanese call Tsundere.  It’s been in some ways a multi-decade love/hate dance. As shared in panels during the recent 4th annual KEMA executive conference in Denver, the relationship between electric and gas is changing rapidly given dynamic market developments. Change breeds both opportunities and challenges for the "frenemy" relations bewteen the sectors.

Some utilities, including KEMA panel member Jim Torgerson’s UIL Holdings, deliver both electric and gas and enjoy natural and increasing synergies across their consolidated operations. In other markets, electric and gas compete head to head for end-use applications.  So what’s the current role of natural gas in electric smart grid market development?  Could market dynamics pave the way for a massive round of electric and gas industry M&A and cross-industry consolidation?  The answer to the foe or friend question depends squarely on where you sit in terms of vested stakeholder interests within the integrated energy value chain.

Panels at KEMA addressed the strategic view from 30,000 feet, the road to sustainability, and “Gas- Part of the New Smart Grid Paradigm” the title of which sent, for me at least, a clear sense of KEMA’s perspective on this topic.  Subsequent to attending the Kema event, I received a summary memo from Mark Gabriel, SVP of Black & Veatch, who is a friend and colleague from over the years. Mark attended last week’s EEI conference, also held in Colorado, and his memo noted, “utility executives are betting on gas at least for the near future. Relative to previous years, the generation sector is growing more comfortable about the long term reliability, and pricing, of natural gas as a generation fuel.”

The price of gas for electric power production has fallen over 35% in the past five years following the discovery of vast shale reserves.  Coupled with the Fukushima disaster, could the nuclear renaissance be giving way to a natural-gas fired era of smart grid reason? Is cheaper and more plentiful natural gas foe or new found friend to the emerging electric smart grid?

By Don McDonnell

DENVER - June 9, 2011 - The smart grid remains an enigma to most consumers.  While I have a lot of friends and colleagues from there from over the years, KEMA was in some sense still an enigma to me, at least until this week.  I attended KEMA’s 4th annual utility executive leadership forum in Denver because of the strength of the speaker line up.  I came away not only with a better understanding of the role that KEMA plays in smart grid market developments, but also with an understanding of why KEMA’s smart grid sherpa marketing campaign is certainly fitting to their role.  I’ll be unpacking the Patagonia back packs of several speaker panels from the forum with my perspectives added here in posts over the course of the next two weeks.

Hugo van Nispen, president and managing director of KEMA North America, set the tone for the meeting in his opening remarks when he asserted that, in order to shape the future, utilities must engage consumers and put the voice of the customer at the center of future strategy. He challenged conference participants on the issue of consumer engagement, “do we want to follow or do we want to lead?”