I’ve had occasion over the last few weeks to visit with vendors and utility executives from both sides of the Pond (the Atlantic Ocean) about technology in place and under development for utilities. The good news is that both sides seem to understand the issues the electric industry faces in the U.S., Europe, and to varying degrees, throughout much of the rest of the world.
They are doing their best—both vendors and utilities—to gear up for dealing with fuel price and supply uncertainties, Global Warming political issues, water shortages, legislative and regulatory uncertainty, etc. New software and hardware systems are being developed to enable Smart Grids, improve the delivery of real-time and other data to executives, incorporate distributed generation into the grids, etc.
What is interesting is that while the drivers for all this development work are similar on both sides of the Atlantic, utilities especially, are starting from very different positions. The difference is that in the U.K., deregulation and competition actually took off and worked. U.K. utilities and retailers are competitive and apparently being successful at it. The large retailers have hundreds of thousands, even millions, of customers in some cases. Competition increasingly drives that market, and is driving it toward innovation.
We Americans are no less innovative and involved than our U.K. cousins, but are more driven by regulation and legislation, or the threat of it. Thus, there is considerable lag time in knowing exactly what software/hardware systems to build for dealing with the new utility environment of the next 10 years. That is because regulators and legislators haven’t yet told utilities what they plan to impose.
Regardless of the differences, some of the newer products coming on line on both sides of the Atlantic offer interesting insights into the future. Some of these include:
· New demand-response systems that go beyond the already moderately successful model of vendors contracting with, and pooling, consumers ready to participate and operating their own software systems to do this. This “bundling” of curtailment contracts by vendors came first. What is being developed now are systems that with enable utilities to engage their own customers and mesh these systems with existing utility real-time and back-office systems. These new systems, one of which is in pilots at six U.S. utilities will enable the next step, utilities interacting directly with customers—rather than through a third-party—to reduce consumption.
· New customer-care systems that will begin to enable utilities to know much more about their customers so that when curtailments occur they won’t be unaware of issues such as elderly or ill people in homes, in-home businesses that would be out-of-business if curtailed, etc. Existing customer information systems already capture some of this information, but much more complex demographic details will be needed in the future.
· AMI vendors are learning that they are going to have to work with a variety of communications systems to get the readings back to the utilities as AMI explodes to enable Demand Response. The also are beginning to work with meter data management firms to enable the conversion of all this data into information and feed it back to Artificial intelligence/decisions upport, Financials, Work and Outage Management systems and the CIS to enable tracking everything.
The technological complexities involved in all of this are immense. That means a lot of development work still has to be done—and done quickly in the face of likely electricity shortfalls in the next five to 10 years. The good news is that that development is under way at vendors and utilities both here and in the U.K.
The IT environments utilities have been accustomed to are going to change dramatically. There will be many new systems, many of which we haven’t even heard of before. They will be necessary to do things utilities haven’t done before. It’s going to be fascinating to watch technological development over the next 10 to 15 years. It’s going to be a tech revolution comparable to when we went from manual billing to mainframes, or from mainframes to client-servers. And it is going to embrace much more that customer care and billing, it’s going to include everything utilities do. Utilities will become fully automated, complex entities able to respond to constantly changing external forces. Either that, or they won’t survive what the world is about to throw at them.
Good minds on both sides of the Pond are working the problem. Fortunately, that's how problems get solved.
...lastly, any news on increasing power output through new novel technologies... pre-combustion or nanotechnology?
You will find that the current US utility model is running towards a dead-end generating an increasingly large value destruction as time goes by. The UK model is also generating an important value destruction, but not as large as the US model.
1) "I agree with Jose Antonio's conclusion..."
2) "...I'm certain that the issues you've detailed above are also making his proposed EWPC obsolete, as "too little too late"
3) "The real awakening is going to be when current regulators actually catch on and (hopefully) act in customer's interests."
I thank him for part 1 and while readers may have a different opinion on part 3, they don't need to disagree with his opinion. However, readers need to be very careful on item 2 as it is a False Fact (that he is certain), while reading it to be able to rate it as false. To understand the insidious power of False Facts, please take a look at a brief article "The Power of False Facts," in the EWPC article "IMEUC False Facts" (please hit the link http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/3/2... )
Instead of "too little too late," this is the right time for the US government to take the leadership in global electric power as explained in the EWPC article "Leadership Answers What to do First (please hit link http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/4/1... )," whose summary says: "The answer to the question of what to do first is for the global power industry to get out of the wrong jungle to produce a EWPC based EPAct as soon as possible. That is the kind of leadership needed to face the inevitable fundamental changes required to significantly reduce today's legislative and regulatory uncertainty."