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Smart Meters Not Shaping Up To Be a Strong Driver of CIS Decisions

30 October 2012

Over the past several years, advanced meter deployments were forecasted to impact the customer information system (CIS) replacement rate. For the past 12 years, UtiliPoint has conducted extensive surveys of utility customer service issue and in particular, customer information systems replacements. As part of this year’s survey involving over 200 respondents we find that the [...]

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Stakeholders and Energy Related Decision Making

11 April 2012

In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed in A Theory of Human Motivation that all human needs were not the same. To each individual there is a hierarchy of needs in which lower level needs must be satisfied before higher level needs become a priority. Maslow’s theory is often expressed in the form of a pyramid: Maslow’s [...]

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The Brazilian Smart Grid

29 February 2012

A couple of weeks ago, just before the “Carnival” festivities began, I traveled to Brazil to meet with our sister company, Cimcorp, and to meet with a private utility research and technology company called LACTEC and attend their conference on utility Smart Grid issues. The trip was very informative as the Smart Grid conference covered [...]

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Presentation at CS Week May 2, 2012

15 January 2012

UtiliPoint Managing Director Rand Warsaw will be presenting at CS Week 2012. His presentation “Architecting a Stakeholder-Embraced Smart Consumer Program” is scheduled for Wednesday, May 2, 2012 as a part of the Smart Infrastructure tract.

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Utilities at the Dawn of a New Era

13 December 2011

As I write my last IssueAlert article of 2011, I reflect on my previous work this year (see IssueAlert Archive), as well as Smart Grid articles I’ve read lately that anticipate trends for 2012. In IssueAlert articles this year, I’ve laid out the elements of change that are besetting electric utilities around the world, as [...]

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2011 Predictions – How Did We Do?

5 December 2011

Last January, UtiliPoint published an IssueAlert article offering commentary on issues to watch in the U.S. utility industry as 2011 unfolded.i As 2011 comes to a close, this IssueAlert article will compare that commentary with an analysis of how the year’s issues actually unfolded. Legislation and Regulation Light Bulbs In a little over a month, [...]

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Taming Big Data for Big Impact

11 November 2011

Data. If one word describes the transformation from a utility to a Smart Grid, it would have to be “data.” Central to the concept of a Smart Grid is the overlay of the electric infrastructure with communications infrastructure paired with sensors, data collection and control devices, bringing data from the field to the utility back [...]

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Limited IT Budgets and Growing Demands

7 November 2011

The future of information technology (IT) inside an electric utility is bright, given that the nature of Smart Grid is to layer telecom and IT concepts onto traditional power engineering to create a new kind of utility. In short, IT is on its way to becoming a much more strategic function inside utilities with the [...]

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From Commodities to Services

25 October 2011

There was a time when the phone company—ATT, or Ma Bell as it came to be known—delivered two types of telecommunications service over its network—local and long distance telephony—likely on plain Jane telephones that it leased to its customers. It was a good business, times were good, but with the advance of digital technology, the [...]

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Technology Challenges to Grid Power

19 October 2011

As revolutionary as electricity has been to our society, the source of electricity hasn’t changed much in over 100 years. Need electricity? Then either plug in (to grid-delivered power) or hook up to a battery (previously charged by the grid). The grid is the mechanism by which remotely generated power, mostly from heating water to [...]

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