Yesterday’s ratepayers are today’s power consumers – a reality that has plenty of utility execs reaching for the antacid. Ratepayers were mostly passive purchasers of electricity. Consumers have a long list of demands that includes energy efficiency, electric vehicle charging, renewable energy, and dynamic pricing. Some of them are even becoming mini-utilities themselves, mounting solar arrays...
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Key Learnings from the EUCI Conference: Optimizing the Interconnection Process for Renewables & Storage Over the summer, West Monroe co-sponsored EUCI’s Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Interconnection conference in Philadelphia. Multiple leaders of the DER interconnection process at major utilities, including PECO, Ameren, and BGE, presented their experiences managing a process with...
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Utility executives looking to recruit the smartest engineering graduates have lots to offer: Tens of billions of dollars of fresh investment pouring into grid modernization and sustainability projects, cutting-edge communications technology, and creating state of the art big data platforms and using machine learning to create insights to improve reliability and increase efficiencies.…
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Technology, and how we interact with it, is evolving every day. Someday, virtual overlays, like in Minority Report and Terminator, might not be science fiction. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), two relatively new interactive experiences, have had their rises and falls throughout time as new technology became widely available, but not enough to sustain user engagement in the...
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Over the years, the utility industry has developed an ingrained safety culture. When we think about these safety programs, we often think of the hard hat, the steel-toe boots, flame resistant clothing, keeping three points of contact as we climb the stairs, and dozens of other little things that can make big differences when it comes to safety.…
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While Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have languished over the past several decades, major technical advancements within the past few years have brought forth a resurgence of interest in these technologies. From the first AR/VR experiments in 1968, to the failure of the Nintendo Virtual Boy in the 1990s, to the explosive success of the Oculus Rift VR headset...
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Grid Modernization represents the single largest transformation of the electric utility post-WWII. Investments in hardware and software in the digital age promise a more resilient and reliable grid poised to serve the U.S. well into the 21st century. In this article, we discuss the primary drivers of Grid Mod efforts, how they vary by utility, and how approaches have evolved over time.…
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Over the past few years, water utilities have begun to embrace the importance of a unified customer experience strategy – one that involves technological transformation, employee engagement, and process improvements. This customer-centric paradigm shift is primarily driven by changes to regulators focus on customer satisfaction, heightened increase to conservation, and the digital effect to...
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As distributed energy resources grow across the network, the method of managing DERs becomes an increasingly digital process – including opening new energy markets at the edge of the distribution grid. This is a very big opportunity for electric utility companies, but are they ready? The evolution of “digital DER” has seen the establishment of DER interconnection platforms, complete with DER...
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Three years ago, I managed the vendor evaluation process for a utility assessing wireless options for telecom connectivity to substations. The field was limited to two vendors and cybersecurity was an important topic we wanted to explore in more detail with each. One specific area we sought to understand was the process used to address any cybersecurity issues that might arise with the...
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As we approach the midpoint of 2018, here are some of the top challenges West Monroe sees in the water industry. Water utility leaders continue to face issues produced by years of underinvestment — aged infrastructure, highly-public water crises, and unmet customer service expectations. Furthermore, as water utilities introduce new technology to address these issues, there are increasing...
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West Monroe attended the 2018 CS Week conference hosted in Tampa earlier this month. CS Week is the premier annual educational and customer service conference serving electric, gas, and water/wastewater utility professionals globally. I attended CS Week a few years ago, and the big talk then was how “rate payers are now our customers, and they are demanding improved service.” Since then we...
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