Industry Highlights

For electric utilities, inspecting power lines is critical.  The inspections serve many purposes, from safety to reliability, and they help optimize utility tree trimming activities and other [...]

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects data on outage frequency and duration from electric utilities, for every outage that lasts more than five minutes, and releases a report [...]

Industroyer was the malware responsible for taking the Ukraine electrical grid offline for approximately one hour in 2016.  I have written about cybersecurity and system hacking previously, but [...]

Utility public relations efforts are often overly-simplistic in their approach.  Some utilities seem to have a “build it and they will come” attitude, but alas, it’s not that simple.  Like [...]

As of the time of this post (May 11, 2018), Hawaii’s Big Island is continuing to get hammered by a relentless onslaught of earthquakes and lava from Kilauea, the most active volcano on the [...]

The topic of wind energy might seem out of place for this blog, but as an emergency preparedness enthusiast, I closely monitor trends around both climate change and renewable energy sources – the [...]

Retiring nuclear power plants could accelerate climate change, according to a report commissioned by Nuclear Matters in response to the impending shutdown of 4 plants in PA and OH.  The reason is [...]

Workflow automation is the gold standard when it comes to the utility industry in general, and outage restoration in particular.  The term refers to the digitization of pre-defined and repeatable [...]

I was floored to learn that multiple gas and oil drilling companies in California have violated state regulations an average of 127 times each year since 2015!  These violations have encompassed [...]

A paper written by researchers at the University of South Florida was recently published that analyzed the impact of social connections on people’s decisions to evacuate when ordered to do [...]