Revamping the electricity grid -- a focus of the $787 billion stimulus package that President Obama signed in February -- is a strategic challenge for utility companies like Xcel Energy. Meeting that challenge, says Xcel CIO Mike Carlson, will depend on information technology.
Xcel is in the middle of a $100 million pilot, SmartGridCity, that aims to give customers IT-based tools for managing their electricity consumption. During the past year, Xcel has begun equipping up to 45,000 homes and small businesses in Boulder, Colo., (as well as the distribution grid) with sensors that will monitor the energy usage of its customers. The sensors transmit this information to an online dashboard that customers can view, then use to make decisions about how much power they want to consume and when. As consumers cut their power use (and bills), less power will be wasted, reducing Xcel's costs and ultimately its carbon footprint. The project is among a handful of IT-based electricity management projects in the United States, says Doug Washburn, a Forrester Research analyst.
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
Surviving Windows is easier than you think… MKS offers the power of an integrated all-in-one environment and provides you with the Power of UNIX on Windows Learn More
Brought to you by:
contests & free stuff
We have 5 copies of these two new books to give to some lucky readers. The deadline for entries is November 30, 2009.
AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.
In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases
built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC
technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability
and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.
On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.
Esther Schindler
claird
pasmith
Sandra Henry-Stocker
jfruh
mikelgan
Quick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.
