Microsoft Power and Utilities Blog

An announcement today about the next iteration of Hohm , the online energy management tool announced last year, made me think about a prediction that  IDC Energy Insights made earlier this year, that 20 million smart meters would be installed across...

Smart Grid continues to make progress. One of the most important areas under discussion is the notion of securing the Smart Grid. What does this really mean? How do we add tens of millions of Smart Meters and even more smart devices like thermostats or...

The sales for Kinect have been amazing with over 18 million sold in the past year and we were honored to receive a Guinness World Record for the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever. As consumers, we may take devices like Kinect for granted...

From time to time I take a break from my day job in this blog to talk about other experiences that are significant or have touched me in a special way. During this US Thanksgiving holiday I had a couple of things that came to mind. One was Microsoft being...

The Utilities industry is becoming more attuned to the idea of continuous innovation in its business practices as evidenced by the tremendous turnout at the Utilities Innovation Summit held in Wiesbaden, Germany in May. The summit, sponsored by Accenture...

Utilities are facing unprecedented levels of regulatory compliance in an increasingly fast-moving business environment. Not only are they exposed to the harsh atmosphere of competition and enforcement, but on an almost daily basis, management and boards...

  With the Olympic Games 2012 well underway in London, it’s a good time to take a step back and think about how technology impacts motion and our studies of continuous improvement. And we’ll do this because it ties in so nicely with a new video from...

Telvent to Leverage Microsoft Azure Our first blog post about the use of cloud computing in the Utility sector occurred in December 2008, when we noted how Utilities were already looking to various types of computing models that could achieve greater...

In the West, the word ‘cornucopia’ symbolizes  world is associated with ‘plenty,’ ‘abundance,’ ‘fortune, and ‘fertility.’ Our 2012 partner conference in Toronto last month , coming as it always does in the first days of Microsoft’s new fiscal year...

Big data is all the rage these days and rightly so. The industry is steadily coming to appreciate the incredible value that can come from the geometric data multiplications occurring each day. The challenge, of course, is organizing the data so that it...

Successful criminals know that all security systems have weak points and they set about the ‘job’ of locating and exploiting them. And they know this because most security systems are after-the-fact considerations, or add-ons. The security system wasn...

Knowledge management in complex utility organizations has become the sine qua non for continuing progress and profitability. Email communications contain so much information that they are ripe repositories for the expansion of knowledge – as well as the...

The mission-critical reliability concerns of utilities require them to seek continuing assurance that any changes to standard operating procedures will work as advertised and continue to work correctly once implemented. In view of utilities concerns about...

My last blog entry described what happened at our CIM Users’ Group Meeting last month but at a more fundamental level I feel we owe some background about what CIM is and why and how Microsoft is involved. Here then are a few questions and answers that...

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion concerning visions for the Cloud in the advancement and development of the smart grid from a governmental and industry policy perspective. The setting was perfect, in Microsoft...

We came across this stunning video of a utility line worker being lifted by a helicopter onto live electricity wires to perform a choreographed maintenance performance while a million volts course around his body. There are several more videos, with commentary...

On December 2, Microsoft participated in a press conference announcing its involvement with the Austin Energy Pecan Street Project, which is billed as a “smart grid” and “utility redesign” effort by city and utility officials. In making the announcement...

The energy ecosystem is about to explode. Not literally, of course, but figuratively, especially as sensors and measuring devices are installed, wired (or made wireless), and start communicating with new systems at the utility that are geared toward making...

We’ve been writing for years about how the smart energy ecosystem of the future is transforming the work of the utility industry and created our Smart Energy Reference Architecture to directly address the issues that arise from one of those transformative...

  I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Bentley Systems’ Be Together conference held on May 23-26, 2011, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, Pa. If you are not familiar with Bentley , they are uniquely dedicated to providing...

Every summer we at Microsoft go through a rejuvenating process at the end of our fiscal year (June 30 th ) that cleans the soul and refocuses our efforts on strategy, partners and customers for the coming new year. Since about 95 percent of Microsoft...

Just a couple of years many were nervous about talking too much about the cloud and its great possibilities for the utilities. But times have changed and when we read announcements like one out recently from OpenText it’s nice to see that our vision for...

We have written many times about our cloud momentum and how we have bet the company on the cloud and that most of the people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working on cloud technologies and solutions. But real momentum comes from partners...

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the 2009 National Town Meeting on Demand Response and Smart Grid several weeks ago at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. I represented Microsoft as part of Tuesday’s keynote session featuring U.S. Representative...

Our phones have been ringing ringing off the hook with utilities interested in learning more about the press release we put out yesterday announcing our release of the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA), a 130 page document that is intended...