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Written by Chris Hickman
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Friday, 20 May 2011 00:00 |
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By Chris Hickman
President Innovari Energy
Guest Blogger
We in the utility industry live in a world where we’re constantly walking on egg shells. This is odd since the stakes around industry transformation are so high, and we feel as if we are each carrying a battleship on our shoulders while trying not to disturb the egg shells on which we tread.
Have you ever reached that point where you are just tired of the conversation? We have our own worst enemies within our industry. More than 70% of the people in this industry don't actually know how the grid really works. Less than that have actually been part of a regulatory proceeding to see the difficulty that is involved for commissions to attempt to balance the needs of all stakeholders. So now we have all of these new “smart grid” entrants pop up, fly in, and make completely uninformed statements. And then we all spend the next few months dispelling the myths of yet another uninformed individual. Why?
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Written by Peter Manos
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Thursday, 12 May 2011 00:00 |
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By Peter Manos
Principal Strategy Consultant
Utilities have built the grid smartly enough from the start, to meet the normal fluctuations in demand that are typically seen, and have always placed a high value on anything that can reduce peak demand, and increase what we call “diversity of load,” or the random element that tends to offset different electric customer’s usage patterns. The more diverse the load, the less sharp and high the peaks in demand will be. Tiny Tim’s wedding eliminated the normal diversity, since a lot more people stayed up late to watch the show, and many then shut off their TVs at the same moment.
Delivering the value of making the load more diverse is a key element of a wide range of Smart Grid technologies currently being deployed, including those championed by the various clients of The McDonnell Group that you can read about elsewhere on our website.
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Written by Peter Manos
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Friday, 06 May 2011 00:00 |
By Peter Manos
Principal Strategy Consultant
Is this the face of the man who almost singlehandedly brought down the electric grid?
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Written by Marc Marton
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 09:42 |
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 Don’t let Fukushima tragedy hinder nuclear power innovation
by
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There’s no telling how long it will take Japan to recover from the devastation caused by the tsunami in March. Likely, decades. What’s certainly true is recovery from the human tragedy will never be fully complete.
The man-made disaster still in progress at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant is only adding to the misery, yet as we honor the dead and injured, it could be said that nuclear energy may be a victim as well.
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Written by Don McDonnell
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Wednesday, 23 March 2011 00:00 |
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Distributed Energy Resource Management Takes Smart Grid Beyond DA & DMS
By Don McDonnell
The emerging utility solution category of Distributed Energy Resources (DER for short) includes an alphabet soup of programs and technologies -- some decades old and well proven -- and some a by-product of today’s recent smart grid market developments.
Before I explore DER, some context: The smart grid is about multi-decade utility industry transformation. It’s a process that will ultimately encompass everything that Ventyx, an ABB Company describes as "Source to Socket” and all that happens from generation to consumer and in between.
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