10 power game changers to be thankful for

This week, as Americans gather around turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce suspiciously shaped like the can it came from, we’ll all give thanks. In honor of that holiday, here’s a short list of power game changers to add to your list.

10. ARRA smart grid funding. It sure did lots to help a number of slower moving pilots get a real boost. It may not have started new projects, but it bolstered old ones, expanded them and is letting them see an end-date before the next century. More details by clicking here.

9. Smarter smart grid thinking. With the right plans in place, all could be right in the smart grid world, but we don’t get anywhere, really, without good planning. More details by clicking here.

8. Solyndra’s collapse. I know. I know. It was bad. But, we often learn best from our mistakes, and that one was a doozy. While I still find this to be a “hindsight is 20/20” moment, it can teach us a few things. And it’s gotten every side of the political equation at least talking about green energy. More details by clicking here.

7. Great moments in outage recovery 2011. Hurricanes and storms galore have hit the U.S. this year, and American utilities have weathered the weather well. More details by clicking here.

6. Linemen. Seriously. Linemen. Don’t think linemen are important? Really? Try climbing the pole to put out that transformer fire yourself sometime. More details by clicking here.

5. Learning to talk to customers. Not just sending a bill and “we’re done.” Customers showed they could be brutal about the smart grid this year. So, the time to keep those customers informed is now. More details by clicking here.

4. The rise of social media to inform those customers. To use an old motto: By any means necessary. And social media is today’s necessary means. More details by clicking here.

3. Virtual power plants. Not your daddy’s power plant, this shiny new source of system efficiency can bring together old and new, renewable and not, top-down and bottom-up generation sources. It may be the transitional power answer while only existing in the ether---or in the cloud. More details by clicking here. And here.

2. Efficiency. It’s the single fastest way to make that heavy power load a little lighter. You don’t have to add more generation if you can make it all a bit more efficient, and a number of utilities around the world have been doing just that this year. More details by clicking here.

1. The shadow potential of data. The smarter the grid gets, the more we know about it. We’re making that grid more intelligent from one end to the other, which will result in a lot of data points to play with. What a utility can do with all that data in the arenas of customer service, grid efficiency, renewable integration and business opportunities is still gray and amorphous. But, it’s a gray area with a ton of future possibilities. And, future possibilities are what I’m always most thankful for. More details by clicking here.

UPCE to show off robots, industry experts, and demos for all

The fourth annual Utility Products Conf. & Expo (UPCE) features an unusual surprise this year: three Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) robots demonstrating their mad skills onsite.

UPCE has everything a utility worker needs to do his job—from tools to cutting-edge technology to the latest insider information. UPCE is bringing a lot of hands-on expertise to Texas this Jan. 24-26 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio

Robots Galore
By far, the biggest UPCE buzz this year centers around that trio of robots. EPRI has generously agreed to show off two of their cutting edge power industry research robots, Ti and Scotty, at the show. The third robot will have its grand unveiling at the event and is a hush-hush secret until the reveal on Tuesday, Jan. 24 on the exhibit floor.

The first robot is nicknamed “Ti,” which is short for “transmission inspection.” Shaped a bit like a giant’s breadbox, Ti can be permanently installed and cover about 80 miles of power line a couple of times each year as it “crawls” along the line identifying numerous issues from grass and trees too close to the right-of-way to just how components along the line are weathering the wilds.

The second robot, Scotty, looks a bit like the classic NASA lunar lander. Scotty will demonstrate his lighting measurement skills in a roving display on the Utility Products Conference & Exposition's outdoor exhibit floor.

The third robot is still a secret, but it’s rumored to be an exciting advancement in inspecting tricky bits of equipment. More will be revealed at the show.


Session Details
Robots aren’t the only reason to attend UPCE, however. The show will offer a number of informative conference sessions.

UPCE officially kicks off with an opening keynote session on this Tuesday morning, Jan. 24, 2012. After the keynote, the conference itself is open for business with a bevy of learning opportunities.

Experts from the Electrical Industry Training Institute (EITI) will present a number of sessions during the conference, including a two-part session on managing electrical operations. This industry overview will provide utility management personnel with an orientation to T&D hardware and equipment, including underground distribution and substations. Session participants will leave with an enhanced knowledge of an electrical utility operations system.

Speaker Gerry Bramhill will helm both parts. Part 1 will cover maintenance, best work practices and field management. Part 2 will cover hazards, safety training, bonding and auditing.

Arkansas State University’s Dr. Duane Doyle will speak on developing occupation programs at local community colleges during the conference. Today, occupational options and certification courses can be found popping up in regional colleges all over the country. This session will look into creating and growing those programs in your community to educate the work force of the future.

UPCE will also present a two-part session on occupational grounding. Matt Dell with Hi-Line Utility Supply Co. will run the first part, giving an overview of best practices and standards. Steve Gordon with Hubbell Power Systems/AB Chance takes over the second hour with an insider’s look at equi-potential grounding including its history, the effects of current on man and the use of mats, among other topics.

Our EITI experts return with a session on understanding switching best practices. Tim Lollar will show the best ways to use switching for maintenance, fault clearing and reliability.

Bill Neiles with the National Utility Industry Training Fund (NUITF) will discuss crafting training and development for line workers during UPCE. This session will draw on the expertise of NUITF’s partnership between utilities and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to give attendees a peek into their hands-on utility boot camps to screen newbies.

Finally, local utility CPS Energy discusses adopting lessons from local smart grid work. This session will offer first-hand experience and lessons from a utility’s actual and on-going advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and distribution automation (DA) implementation.

Additionally, EITI will offer some precourses on qualifying employees to work near high voltage substation equipment and high voltage substation grounding and bonding on Monday, Jan. 23, 2012, before the show begins. More information on those precourses can be found online at http://eiti.us/upce.html.


Other Informational Options
Outside the hour-long conference sessions, UPCE will include half-hour robot demonstrations multiple times daily Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Jan. 24-26.

Bulli Ray will present thirty-minute attack prevention courses to teach field workers to fend off an aggressive dog. Those demonstrations, which will include live dogs, will be ongoing in the outdoor exhibit area twice daily Tuesday, Wednesday and Thurday during the show.

Omicron will bring the company’s product bus to the show, offering show ten-minute courses on testing reclosers, sectionalizers and power quality meters, setting up a protection test library, understanding transformer diagnostics, and utilizing IEC 61850.

Also, each UPCE exhibitor will set aside 15 minutes during the show to offer a product demonstration, showcasing the company’s product or service to conference attendees.

All of these demonstrations, along with times and locations, will be listed in the show guide available onsite.


Just for Fun
All UPCE attendees should plan to kick up their heels at the Round ‘Em Up Networking Party on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012. Pack your cowboy boots. It’s time to party western style. This year’s even will include the Texas Unlimited band, food, drinks and bucking a mechanical bull.

The UPCE exhibit floor offers other options for fun as well, including an opening reception with drinks on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012, and the “It’s 5 O’ Clock Somewhere” happy hour with exhibitors on Wed., Jan. 25, 2012, right before attendees rush to the boot-scootin’ network party.

As you walk the floor, watch carefully for a few Hooters girls. A handful of the local beauties will be available for snapshots and autographs, along with their duties as hostesses at the cash prize giveaway.

The cash prize giveaway will be featured on the UPCE exhibit floor all week. All attendees are eligible to enter the contest. Just get your passport stamped by all the sponsors, and your name may be called to get a few minutes in our money machine. The Hooters girls will escort your trip in and out of the booth. You may go in broke and come out ready to buy the next round.

So join us for UPCE 2012 Jan. 24-26, 2012, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio. I look forward to seeing you there. (I'll be the girl in the cactus-design cowboy boots.)

More information on the show can be found at http://utilityproductsexpo.com.

PNM’s social media saves Santa Fe adventure

Earlier this month I spent a long weekend in Santa Fe, NM. It’s an annual trip, and we purposely go in the minutes before winter hits the high desert in order to avoid fellow tourists just like us. We’re careful planners, since we know the weather in northern New Mexico at this time of year can be brutal and turn on a dime. In early November we suddenly become addicted to Weather Underground, we pull up Google maps and pull out furry earmuffs. We know all the wind channels and dust storm possibilities in the hundreds of miles of I-40 between here and there.

Due to that careful, obsessive planning, waking up to snow on that first Santa Fe morning wasn’t a surprise, but the massive power outage was. In all our minute attention to minute detail, we hadn’t counted on the emergence of chaos theory---things rarely go as perfectly planned.

So, we’d planned to sit by the fire a bit, enjoy the snow. We had that mental picture in our heads. But, we hadn’t planned to eat M and Ms and road trip snack foods for breakfast because the restaurant was closed, nor that we’d have to sit huddled together by that gorgeous fire in the hotel lobby with four layers of clothing squinting to read by the gray light that filtered through snow flurries.

Turns out the light and lovely snow wasn’t to blame for this outage, however. A tree fell onto some transmission lines and knocked out power to downtown Santa Fe for a little over three hours. Even without power, I knew this within an hour of the first light flicker. How? My phone still had juice and the local utility, PNM (formerly Public Service Co. of New Mexico in full), has a Twitter feed.

Now, I’ve never been one of those people who adore social media. I often think it’s odd that everyone believes I want to see pictures of their dogs, know what they had for breakfast or comment on their latest viewing of American Horror Story. What I realized during this Santa Fe trip, however, is that social media like Twitter allows utilities to send out valuable information to thousands without the necessity of massive phone banks or even having to adjust HTML coding on large and unwieldy websites. It’s simple and easy---and in this case, incredibly effective. Within two minutes and 140 characters, I knew exactly why the power went out.

PNMtalk: 10,450 w/p power due to 9 a.m. Santa Fe transmission outage. N-Tano Norte S-Camino Sudest E-Paseo Primero W-Legacy. Crews working.

PNMtalk: PNM crews removing tree from a transmission line and making repairs. Estimating a noon restore for Santa Fe customers.

Those two tweets made me a convert. We knew what happened and an estimate of restoration. So, we bundled up and went outside. We enjoyed the snow and the cold and, in fact, were in a Santa Fe café by 12:30 eating huevos rancheros with all power restored.

Pike Research recently released a new report on utilities and social media, labeling the use “somewhat chaotic” in our industry. There are concerns about controlling information and conversations between the employees and the consumers on the utility end of things. Those concerns may be valid, but, from the consumer side of the equation, up-to-date, quick information during outages is invaluable and worth a little risk.

In the report, Pike estimates that about 57 million customers will talk to utilities over social media in 2011, with that number leaping to 624 million by the end of 2017. So, perhaps others should take note from PNM’s clever use, as social media isn’t going away anytime soon. In an outage, what I've got is my phone. And Twitter is easiest to access from there. It's simple, and it's logical.

There’s nothing worse than being in the dark---both literally and figuratively. With a couple of tweets, PNM lit up on our dark situation, allowing us to figure out a good timetable. Hooray, the outage wasn’t going to last forever. The darkness wasn’t going to eat our vacation. We weren’t going to run out of M and Ms and start eyeing each other’s femurs. PNM used 140 characters to put our minds at ease, and that is the power of social media, especially Twitter---a lot of consumers in the know instead of in the dark. That has great potential.

And, while I was impressed that PNM was on the cutting edge of Twitter-adoption, I was even more impressed with their estimate of restoration---they were bang on the money. We noticed that lights were back on in shops and businesses at about 12:08, and we went about the rest of our vacation more thankful for PNM’s Twitter feed than for our Google maps, furry earmuffs or road trip M and Ms.

And, before next year’s Santa Fe trip, I’m going to take a look at their Twitter feed. Just in case.

Could an investment in Greek energy save world stock markets?

I think we can all agree that Greece has been a bit of a problem lately. I think even the Greeks might admit that at this point. And, it’s not that we don’t love the Greeks. We do, but we don’t much love their economy right now. To put it mildly: Their economy is in a bad, bay way. All of Europe is trying to fix it. Now, whether or not Greece will accept that European Union (EU) “we’ll-pull-your-bacon-out-of-the-fire” bill full of “haircuts” and bailouts is a matter for a people’s referendum at this point. And the idea that, perhaps, the Greek people might just let their bacon sizzle, thank you, is enough to send the international stock markets into a depression this week.

Now, you may be like me and marvel that a country with about the same amount of citizens as the New York City metro area could singlehandedly bring international economies to a grinding halt. But, the fact remains that it obviously can or the stock market insanity of the last week would have been---well, a little less insane.

It traces like this: Greece is in the European Union. If they fall out or are kicked out---and there really is no clean exit plan either way---it could destabilize the EU and pretty much the continent of Europe. The makes other continents, like Asia and our own, decidedly fidgety. So, like people tossing heavy luggage off a sinking boat to get a few more minutes above water, stocks start to get chunked over the side to lighten the load.

We may not like it, but it seems someone, anyone, has to save Greece to save all our economic necks. So, is there a solution?

The International Energy Agency (IEA) thinks there may be a rescue plan for the Greek economy hidden inside the country’s own energy market.

In late October, IEA released a report on Greece stating that allowing competition and ratcheting down the government’s role in energy could help the problematic country with economic recovery. (In fact, all EU member states recently adopted the third Internal Energy Market Directives which basically says “you will deregulate”---or ‘liberalize,’ to use the European term.)

“Reforming Greece’s electricity and gas markets is a policy imperative that should add efficiency and dynamism to the Greek economy. This, in turn, should help generate self-sustained employment and prosperity for the country,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said as she presented the study titled Energy Policies of IEA Countries – Greece 2011.

The IEA had a few recommendations for Greece to make the electricity market, in particular, more attractive. First and foremost is more competition. (State-run Public Power Corporation [PPC] pretty much still dominates both the wholesale and retail markets in the country, along with owning all the transmission and distribution assets and having a huge stake in the operator for the transmission market.) The IEA wants a “strong and independent regulator” in place to pry PPC away from some of these monopoly positions, which is understandable. The only problem is: Who’s in place to do that? Pretty much no one.

One area that the IEA points to with great potential is Greece’s renewable arena, especially wind and solar. IEA gave Greece brownie points for a renewable sector that already offers increased feed-in tariffs and simplified licensing. The agency even applauded Greece’s “determined” effort to fulfill the country’s renewable potential. Again, like the increase in competition, this may be a product of overall EU policy since there’s a 2020 renewable energy target in place for all member countries. Still, in nice to see some positive Greek news.

There was a caveat in all the renewable happy talk, however---namely that it “will be crucial that framework conditions to investment remain stable.”

That was pretty much the gist of the entire report on Greek energy: Keep things stable so people will give you money cuz you need it. The report's summary states:

Investments and competition are needed for ensuring the financial efficiency of the electricity sector. Investments by independent power producers in both renewable and flexible conventional generation will be necessary in the transformation to a low-carbon, green electricity market. Competition can also drive prices down and help mitigate the costs of necessary network investments and renewable energy supports.

Well, that may be the kicker. It’s that old “you have to spend money to make money” adage. Greece needs an influx of cash in order to get their power markets in order so that those, in turn, can help with the teetering Greek economy. But, who will start the ball rolling? Everybody here wants someone to invest in Greece to save all our collective bacon, but no one really wants to be the investor and put personal funds where our hopes are---not with financial reforms and not with energy market investments.

At least, not today.

So, yes, investments in energy infrastructure could help the Greek economy---but the cash isn't going to come right now, nor will it come quickly enough to save our stock market bacon. Infrastructure and market building could be a way to ensure Greek stability in the future, but it's certainly not a cure for the current and immediate crisis.

If that EU bill passes the Greek referendum, however, we may be humming a different tune. There is infrastructure and energy reform tied up into that package of haircuts and loans. But, first, the Greek people have to tell us just how much hair they are willing to trim or whether every lock will remain in place. Then we'll talk about energy market reform.

UPDATE: Thurs. Nov. 3, 2011. Greek prime minister has declared "no need" for a referendum, but has not officially called off the planned vote.