The technology investment conundrum

摘要

It's been a year and a half since darkness fell over the north-east, and one of the opportunities that arose in the post-blackout analysis was to improve control center and related technologies to provide better situational awareness for the nation's expert, but aging, electric operations workforce. It's no secret that over the next 5-10 years the industry will lose a large percentage of the experience base. There are a lot of organizations doing some great work to fix some of the problems identified as the cause of the blackout; but has the investment community rallied to bring the innovation needed to allow the industry to take a leapfrog approach to improve that situational awareness needed to enhance reliability and capture critical knowledge for the future? Today's control room needs some new tools added to its tool box to not only provide better visualization of what's happening on the grid, but also to help companies maintain the institutional memory that will be lost as more senior operators retire.