By the time this issue of Electric EE T&D magazine is in the hands of our readers (along with DistribuTECH attendees), 2018 will be in full swing.
With the arrival of this New Year comes EE T&D magazine’s 20th anniversary. While the official anniversary hits in September, we expect to celebrate this milestone throughout the year. Just in time for the 20th anniversary, we have unveiled a new look for the magazine and the Electric Energy Online website: www.electricenergyonline.com.
As we began mapping out the editorial calendar for 2018, we reviewed the market/ application focus areas we covered this past year. We took a look at those topics we wanted to keep, as well as any additional trends or issues we should include. One area we felt we needed to address is women’s place in the power sector. Considering that women make up only 24 percent of this industry, this seems like a good time for EE T&D to showcase the role they have played and continue to play in moving our industry forward. With this in mind, we have launched our newest column, Powherful Forces, where we spotlight those women whose tenacity, intelligence and leadership have helped shape the industry.
In our first Powherful Forces column, we introduce our readers to Sharon Allan, currently serving as chief innovation officer for SEPA. Allan is one of the six percent of women holding a C-level position in the power sector. In the many years Allan has worked as an engineer in the male-dominant industries of IT and energy, she has witnessed an abundance of transformational change and offers her insights on some of the most notable developments in the utility space.
During 2018, EE T&D will continue to cover market/application topics like distributed energy resources, IoT, smart grid workforce management and electric vehicles. New topics on which we will focus include artificial intelligence in the power grid, machine learning/augmented reality and software as a service.
One of the more recent topics to emerge that did not make it into our list of market/ application topics is blockchain. It appears blockchain will assume a more prominent role in the industry, but currently, there are a lot of questions about what the technology is and what it can do. With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to share how Anuj Thakkar, an engineering student at Duke University explained the technology in his paper titled “How Blockchain and Peer-to-Peer Energy Markets Could Make DERs More Attractive”.
As Thakkar explains, “A blockchain is a distributed chronological ledger that is hosted, updated, and validated by several peer ‘nodes,’ rather than by a single centralized authority; by eliminating the central authority and having immutable transaction records that are validated by several peers, the blockchain increases the simplicity, speed, and transparency of transactions between two peers. An example implemen¬tation of blockchain is in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin: while typical credit card transactions require validation from a bank and can take time, blockchain doesn’t require this central validation, and transactions can happen immediately between two parties.”
Writing for “Harvard Business Review,” James Basden and Michael Cottrell discuss how utilities are deploying blockchain. According to Basden and Cottrell, “Blockchain has grabbed the attention of the heavily regulated power industry as it braces for an energy revolution in which both utilities and consumers will produce and sell electricity. Blockchain could offer a reliable, low-cost way for financial or operational transactions to be recorded and validated across a distributed network with no central point of authority. As in the financial services industry, this capability has prompted some people to explore whether blockchain may one day replace a portion of utilities’ businesses by doing away with the need for intermediaries altogether.”
It could be a while before blockchain is a widely adopted technology in the energy industry, or it may take no time to find its way into the mainstream. While we wait, if you or your company has a story about plans for integrating blockchain, or if you already have a case study of successfully implementing the technology, let me know, as I would like to pass along that information to our readers.
In fact, if any of these trends I’ve listed, or if any of those in our media kit are areas about which you would like to share information with our readers, send me an abstract of your proposed article.
To all of our readers, advertisers, and industry partners, thank you for helping us achieve our 20-year landmark. We could not have reached this milestone without your support.
As we move into the next chapter of EE T&D magazine, we look forward to sharing your accomplishments and informative articles and hope you will continue to update us on your discoveries and successes.
If you would like to contribute an article or if you have an idea about interesting technology, solutions, or suggestions, please email me at Elisabeth@ElectricEnergyOnline.com.
Elisabeth
