Utilities are now in the heat of battle. While they would like to maximize their sales, they must now persuade their customers to save energy. It's a quest that will help defer investments in expensive and contentious infrastructure and in doing so, prevent the release of some harmful emissions.
UtiliPoint has had the opportunity to meet with several of the business leaders from utilities, vendors and outsourcers to ask their opinions on the changing environment in the utility sector and what it means to their organization. When asked the most important need facing the industry, the head of one vendor gave a simple, but astute, answer—"the industry needs people who can see the big p
Things are adrift in places around the country. In the Northeast, for example, the states all have renewable portfolio standards while they also participate in a regional greenhouse gas initiative, all of which is meant to cleanse the air and cut global warming pollutants. The dilemma there and elsewhere is that the transmission line permitting process is tumultuous and impedes those goals.
Talk of the graying utility workforce is starting to get old. Now the language is focused more on pending opportunities -- the need to fill futuristic energy jobs.
If all electric utilities had the same generation mix and customer demand profiles, benchmarking their FAC performance would be easy. You would just list their costs per MWh and compare them. The problem with this is that they all have different generation fleet portfolios and customer demand profiles. This Indicator is easy to produce but using it to incentivize performance could just as easily l
Record high gas prices are firing up new research. The goal is to commercialize electric vehicles capable of going long distances before they would need fuel.
The first attempt to bring forth cap and trade legislation to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions died earlier this month when the Lieberman-Warner-Boxer Climate Change Bill failed in the Senate on procedural grounds. While the bill received more support than previous attempts at climate legislation, much of that support was more symbolic that concrete.
America's growth spurt will require more energy. But economic development and environmental progress do not need to be in conflict with one another. Indeed, the country is not helpless when it comes to fighting the effects of climate change, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. In fact, metropolitan areas offer greater energy and carbon efficiencies than less populated regions, in l
The emergence of global carbon markets will not only uncover value and liabilities for corporations, but will also require active carbon asset management on an enterprise level. Ron Dembo, founder of Algorithmics, has recently raised this issue, and he is correct that the time to think of carbon on an enterprise level is now.
The liberalization of Europe's electric and gas markets is taking a rough ride. But a critical compromise to win the backing from France and Germany has emerged, allowing those utilities to keep their distribution units within the corporate confines.
