The last 20 years or so have been very eventful for the U.S. power industry, with markets opening and the government exercising its authority by stipulating what type of generation should be used for electricity production. It has been less than 20 years since FERC’s Order 888 of 1996 effectively unbundled the generation and transmission […]
Big data—that is, a database that is too large to be managed through traditional data management applications—is growing rapidly. As new automated technologies develop, the amount of information available to utilities in particular is set to experience explosive growth. One key trend driving this growth for utilities is smart grids. The Growth of Grid Data […]
Among all other energy resources, natural gas has the longest list of promises to fulfill. Promises of affordable fuel have been given to the power sector, the chemical industry, manufacturers, the transportation industry, and anybody who needs to heat space. I wrote about factors supporting this demand a year and a half ago; ironically, not […]
A few weeks ago, ZE held a public webinar on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market. As one of the business analysts responsible for building this presentation, I performed a fair amount of research on a market that has undergone many structural changes in recent years. We will run a series of three […]