Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)

ANWR – The Developing Controversy The Arctic National Wildlife Range is a fairly desolate frozen tundra region encompassing 8.9 million acres in the Northeast corner of Alaska. It was established in 1960 by the U.S. Department of the Interior as a wildlife refuge. Eight years later the largest oil field in North America, known as Prudhoe Bay, was discovered and developed nearby and the...

Integration of MDMS and OMS

Outage Management-An Evolving Process The electric industry has come a long way since the 1980s with respect to service restoration during unplanned system outages: The manual process of collecting and sorting trouble reports to the call center and manually discerning patterns from which to generate work orders has largely been replaced by sophisticated algorithms of computerized outage...

The Aging Work Force at Electric Utilities

Typical Electric Utilities Age Profile For the last decade many observers have identified the industry’s aging work force as a demographic pattern that poses critical challenges to the safe and reliable operation of many utilities, particularly the electric utilities. The figure to the right highlights an illustrative and typical example of a U.S. electric utility’s work force age composition...

Smart Grid and AMI – Change Management within the Utility

Successful implementation of a Smart Grid and AMI certainly depends on the proper integration of new technologies with existing electric system infrastructure, but it also depends on the human dynamics that are essential to effective change management. Awareness is a Critical Component AMI-Smart Meter Electric utilities should survey their employees understand their assumptions, knowledge,...

The Rising and Critical Role of Electricity

Energy is the Foundation of Modern U.S. Life GDP Growth and Energy Usage Each electric utility’s transmission and distribution system is fundamentally an energy delivery network. A first principle is that total energy usage (broadly defined) and GDP growth have always been and always will be highly correlated. Simply stated, economic growth in the U.S. (and in every developed economy)...