Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Christie recently noted: “The United States is heading for a reliability crisis…. Dispatchable generating resources are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on.”
While families gathered for a long holiday weekend in late December 2022, the bulk power system narrowly avoided cascading outages across the Eastern Interconnection.
As of this writing, we are well over three years beyond the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilities have been dealing with post-COVID whipsaw effects of higher prices, higher interest rates, and evolving objectives.
In 2017, shared services conferences buzzed with anticipation as banners proclaimed, “The robots are coming!” with robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbot technologies creating a wave of excitement soon followed by conversational agents, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI) promises. Though these technologies have created value in particular parts of our shared services processes, none have yet to
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Our client, a world leader in scientific instrumentation, has grown through technological innovation, commercial excellence, and strength in emerging markets. The company has also enhanced its capabilities and market reach over the years through complementary acquisitions. As acquired businesses integrated into the corporation, disparate human resources (HR) policies and the need for standardized HR processes and systems became increasingly evident. To support the organization’s growth, goals, and objectives, the HR team was focused on standardization of service, administration of global processes, centralization of administrative tasks, and elevation of the HR business partner role. However, implementing these goals was difficult with the widely dispersed employee base, competing objectives of each business, and fluctuations in funding due to economic factors. ScottMadden was engaged to support the HR team in realizing their goals.
The approach to selecting a technology solution not only impacts the path to implementation but often the return on the investment. By following a defined process, companies can avoid stakeholder indecision and ensure the selection meets business goals, cost requirements, and user experience expectations.
As the electric power industry navigates passage through the most significant era of transition since its origin, key questions regarding reliability are emerging. Most importantly, can the industry continue to offer the near-certain level of reliable service that is among its modern day hallmarks? And if not, what are the implications?
Through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress has authorized nearly $400 billion[1] to be invested in U.S. energy infrastructure over the next decade. The combined policies provide an unprecedented amount of federal funding available via grants, tax credits, loan guarantees, and incentive payments. The IIJA and IRA collectively present a unique, once-in-a-generation opportunity for energy companies and utilities to update their aging infrastructure, improve system reliability and resilience, develop clean energy projects, and reduce emissions, while limiting rate impacts for customers.
Prior to the 1990s, investor-owned utilities (IOUs) were largely vertically integrated, housing each utility function—generation, transmission, and distribution—under one roof. This structure, and the large, centralized nature of generation resources at the time, gave rise to a planning process that involved forecasting customers’ demand, building generation to support that demand, and then planning for the necessary transmission and distribution to support energy delivery.
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