MIAMI, Feb. 03 /CSRwire/ – Luxury hotel InterContinental Miami today announced that it has partnered with Greenlight Energy to purchase 15,467,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of wind power in 2012. The purchase is part of a broader corporate-wide sustainability strategy and makes InterContinental Miami the largest green power purchaser in Florida to be named to the most [...]
Integration of smart grid devices, and other new and emerging technologies reliant on communications to control operations of the device pose a threat to the reliability of the electric grid, according to a new report released by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Providing a 10-year outlook on the North American electric industry, the [...]
The use of LiDAR in recent years has led to the discovery, by various utilities, of line clearance discrepancies that were previously not identified and that have had a material impact on the actual facilities rating of the lines. The need for remediation resulted from a number of causes including cable aging, as built errors [...]
Visitors and participants to the 11th International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF) held at the Astor Crown Plaza Hotel in New Orleans, La. February 7-9 were amazed by GeoDigital International, Inc.’s, latest achievement in mobile geospatial and survey data acquisition and processing. ILMF attendees were shuttled off site Tuesday, February 8 to a special parking lot [...]
The early criticism of aerial LiDAR surveys for electric transmission ROW vegetation management was that it was just a data dump of detailed information, and to some extent, that holds true for some LiDAR providers today. They fly the lines and provide the utility with cumbersome data files that don’t translate into useful information without [...]
With $2.5 million budgeted for removal of red cedars from their Right-of-Way (ROW) over a five year period, Northeast Utilities (NU) was able to satisfy reliability and environmental concerns to avoid clear-cutting their ROW with the use of aerial LiDAR surveys which allowed NU to manage vegetation issues proactively and selectively remove only trees that [...]
National Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC) Reliability Standard FAC-008 will require utilities to provide methodology to determine normal and emergency facilities ratings. New technologies such as Dynamic Line Rating (DLR) and aerial LiDAR surveys allow monitoring of transmission line characteristics and environmental conditions, enabling calculation of real-time line ratings and represent key enabling technologies for the [...]
While debate rages between various interest groups whether the Earth’s climate is warming, cooling, man-made or naturally caused …. one of the consequences of a warmer climate has created the circumstances where boreal forests across much of western North America are swiftly, alarmingly turning red, grey then dying. Vast expanses of vivid green forest throughout [...]
East Central Energy combines teamwork and rugged data collection hardware in project By Robert Wick December, 2009 –Like many large utilities, East Central Energy (ECE), a member-owned electric cooperative serving more than 57,000 homes, farms and businesses in rural east central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin, is an amalgam of merged distribution cooperatives. In recent years, [...]
The purpose of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Standard FAC-003 – Transmission Vegetation Management Program, is to improve the reliability of the electric transmission system. NERC believes this can be accomplished by preventing outages from vegetation located on transmission rights-of-way (ROW), maintaining clearances between transmission lines and vegetation, and reporting vegetation related outages [...]
