"If Thomas Edison came back to life, he'd recognize our electric utility system immediately--and that's not a good thing, " says Jesse Berst, publisher of Smartgridnews.com, in Redmond, Wash.
So we will once again be treated to a test of our utility system, a system that has seen more depreciation than new infrastructural investment since 1997, with many transformers 40 or 50 years old.
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New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo called for a radical redesign of the electric utility system in the wake of the post-Sandy electric power outages that kept New York City residents eating dinner by candlelight for the better part of a week in many places.
Despite its utility, System One is often wrong, especially if numbers are involved.
Edison is thus not the normal utility and the system it oversees is anything but simple.
Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include Russian Railways, national power utility Unified Energy System and state-controlled pipeline operator Transneft.
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CMS's Consumers Energy unit has 626 miles of cast- and wrought-iron pipeline in its gas system, or about 2.4 percent of the utility's total distribution system.
Its electronic health record is based on a 44-year-old programming language called MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System).
If shutting down an application frees a lot of memory and doesn't cause problems, look at the listings in the System Configuration Utility's Startup tab for those same tray programs you deem unnecessary--for example, the RealPlayer StartCenter.
Assuming financial incentives, plentiful sunshine and high local utility rates, a PV system could pay for itself within about five years.
BrightSource Energy, an energy company based in Oakland, California, has signed a deal with Southern California Edison, a utility, to implement a system that stores energy in molten salt.
What all really wanted, however, is merchants and other brokering partners to build applications for the system, increasing its utility.
Customers (in this case the school district) pay no money up-front, paying only for the solar energy they use and typically seeing reductions on their utility bills as soon as the system is connected to the grid.
Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
In India, where things too often are still done in triplicate, Andhra Pradesh's pioneering e-seva system lets people pay their utility bills, transfer money, buy railway tickets and so on.
This free utility generates a bootable disk that tests your system, then provides a comprehensive report of its findings.
The firm has built a 40 kilowatt demonstration plant and is partnering with AES, a utility, to build a 1-2MW system.
The investigation into last year's North American blackout revealed that during the precious minutes following the first outages in Ohio, when action might have been taken to prevent the blackout spreading, the local utility's managers had to ask the regional system operator by phone what was happening on their own wires.
He soon broke ranks with utility executives by supporting a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide and other coal-plant pollutants.
Luckily, the utility industry needs to upgrade large portions of its transmission system.
In July, according a report in The Energy Daily, hackers broke into the system monitoring smart meters at a Puerto Rico utility and rolled back consumption readings.
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Put together an online mall and a credit system such as Zynga, and you could wind up with a retail powerhouse running its own payment system, leaving banks to supply the payment utility but not much else.
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The 2.5-acre property has a 51-panel solar system with a 20-year assignable contract with utility company Xcel Energy.
Being an on-site power system allows users to run independently of the public utility grid, ensuring that, no matter what happens to the grid, a company will not lose power and will continue to operate.
Many in the utility industry worry that the most vulnerable part of the power system is its work force, as a wave of retirements is depleting the supply of linemen and other craftsmen who keep the lights on.
These are things like your property insurance, mortgage, utility bills (even the water bill) and a home alarm system.
It is one of the major players in system installation, with the majority of its installation in the utility and power plant segment.
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Dishwashers and water heaters that are programmed to do most of their high energy tasks at night, for instance, or Ford's Value charging system, which leverages a cloud database to charge electric vehicles when utility rates are at their lowest.
It took Schaeffer only five months to analyze the setup and write code that would let him, from his laptop, tell the Scada system to open and close enough breakers to bring down the mock utility--without letting the legitimate operator see what was going on.
Just this week the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) passed a resolution endorsing the continuing modernization of the electric system with smart grid technologies.
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