Water Energy, is it the Future?

Columbia Power Technologies has come out with a prototype wave energy device. It is called the SeaRay and its design allows it to take up to twice as much energy then other developing wave technologies.  The company refers to it as a “heave and surge” energy design. The SeaRay is performing beyond our expectations and tracking well with modeling predictions. The CEO of...

Did a Spider-Man Comic Predict the 1977 Blackout?

Share What Happened in the Comic? Spider-Man and the Wasp were fighting against the villain Equinox who can shoot fire out of his arms.  A blast hit a building and the power transformer went down causing blackouts all over the city.  This issue came out in July, 1977. The same week as the real blackout. What Happened in Real Life? From July 13th, 1977 to July 14th, 1977 the only...

A Coming Bear Market for U.S. Electricity Sales?

Economic forecasters and business professionals alike are increasingly alarmed by the broad weakness of the U.S. economic recovery.  Forecasters in many sectors frequently highlight the “lost decade” of the Japanese economy following that nation’s stock market and real estate crash of the early 1990’s, and they openly wonder about parallel patterns in the U.S. and about the implications...

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trouble reports to the call center and manually discerning patterns from which to generate work orders has largely been replaced by sophisticated algorithms of computerized outage...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)...