Archives

PUR Guide 2012 Fully Updated Version

Available NOW!

This comprehensive self-study certification course is designed to teach the novice or pro everything they need to understand and succeed in every phase of the public utilities business.

Order Now

PUF's Where's Energy

PUF in The New York Times

Elizabeth Warren's PUF article was quoted.

Latest on Grid's De-Carbonizing

A hundred percent will be carbon free by 2050. Or by 2040. Or even by the year 2030, which is but eleven years from now. We hear this in the news all the time, about goals being set for de-carbonizing the country’s production of electricity.

Which begs the question, where do we stand at the present time? On Monday, the U.S. Energy Department answered this important question, through the first half of 2019.

Real Meters, Way!

It wasn’t that long ago that everybody had cumulative electric meters. Thomas Edison invented cumulative meters at the dawn of electric utility service, way back in 1879. Though improved in the century-plus since, a meter still measured how many kilowatt-hours in total a home took since the meter was installed. Meter readers — remember them — dodging your dog and debris would enter your yard and record the total as of that day. Subtract that total from last month’s number and ta-da, the utility could calculate your monthly bill.

Nuclear Plant

When it opened, it was the world’s largest power plant. Its capacity was 108 megawatts.

It was 1911 when Norsk Hydro put into service the Vemork hydro plant in central Norway. In the 1930s much of the power that Vemork produced went to the only factory making heavy water. This was an obscure industrial product until the late thirties, when physicists discovered heavy water was a key to developing an atomic bomb.

The Long and Short of It

Electric service — let’s face it — is weird. What operates devices is part energy and part capacity, part wholesale and part retail, part short-term and part long-term.

Who Are Your Innovation Heroes?

Nominate our industry’s top innovators to be celebrated in November.

July's Electric Rates

The CPI for all goods and services rose 1.8% since July 2018.

Value of Regulation in PUF 89 Years Ago

From the August 7, 1930 issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly, a relevant opinion on the value of regulation. In that issue, editor Henry Spurr, my predecessor, said this:

“All things considered, I think the Commissions have functioned remarkably well as originally intended.

They Said This in PUF

Quotes in August PUF from Commissioners from Iowa, Commissioners from Canada and CEOs from across the country.

Pages