Table of Contents

The importance of appropriately valuing societal benefits such as environmental quality in economic decisions has increased in recent years as the impact of human activity on the world’s environment becomes better understood. While environmental issues have long been important considerations in the utility industry, there is a greater understanding among the key stakeholder groups—utility customers, legislators and regulatory agencies and utilities, themselves—that environmental stewardship and corporate citizenship are important goals. Yet attempts to value these benefits are difficult.

First of all, what exactly is a killer app? The notion was popularized in the book “Unleashing the Killer App” by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, and now killer apps are sought in markets as diverse as computers and board games. Companies launching new products hope to unleash killer apps because they need people to buy their products to do something killer with them—something new, useful, time-saving, money-making, popular or just fun. Many times, the perception is that without a killer app, your concept is dead on arrival.

Utility missions are changing. Once, they focused on delivering reasonably priced power. Now, their missions are evolving to encompass sustainable use and environmental improvement.

The smart grid push continues past the power plant, down the wires and into consumer homes. In a perfect future, consumers will recognize smart grid-compliant products like they recognize Energy Star and Wi-Fi symbols. (Energy Star features a star, and Wi-Fi is that little radiating stick.)

The electric transmission system in the western United States needs to be upgraded and expanded. Existing transmission in the West was built primarily to move power within local utility systems and to connect neighboring utilities to increase reliability.

When it comes to the electric utilities industry, regulatory compliance is more than a goal for information technology departments; it’s the lifeline of the organization.

Engineers typically view symmetrical components as a mathematical machination to transform unbalanced vectors into sets of balanced vectors. This article relates symmetrical components to physical concepts encountered in power system operations.

Current transformers and potential (voltage) transformers are used to supply a reduced value of current or voltage to instrument circuits. They provide isolation from high-voltage systems, permit grounding of secondary circuits for safety and step-down the magnitude of the measured quantity to a value that the instruments can safely handle.

Improving Smart Grid readiness, overhead distribution reliability, and the emergence of predictive technologies will be the focus of an important utility conference taking place in Columbus, Ohio, February 9-11 of 2010.