INDUSTRY NEWS

Energy Industry Events

SUCCESSFUL PRACTICES

"Your Career: Does Anyone Know You Are Out There? What Is Your Brand? "
"Cell Phone Use by Employees While Driving Can Bring Employer Liability "
"Outage Management System (and others) Depend Upon Accurate Field Data Input"
"Protect the Service, Not Just the Meter: The Secret to Reducing Gas and Electricity Theft "

TECHNOLOGY

"A Challenge to Bill Gates on Energy Research"
"Penn State To Lead DOE Energy Innovation Hub"

GAS OPERATIONS

"Land-based Oil Projects Increase During Deep-water Ban"
"Age of Gas Begins: Energy and Security Issues in the Red Sea Transforming"

ELECTRIC OPERATIONS

"ANSI Members Collaborate to Develop Smart Grid Standard"
"Misguided Energy Policy Magnifies Shock of Electric Rate Increases"

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

"ElectricU Puts Electrical Worker Training Online - Adds Metering Courses"
"T+D Webcast"

• Tulsa Pipeline Expo
  September 1-3
• Customer Relations Roundtable
  September 15-17
• National GAS Rodeo
  September 17-18
• Executive & Legal Summit - Regulation and Rates in a Changed Economy
  September 29-October 1
• Measurement Excellence Course 2010
  October 4-6
• Train the Evaluator
  October 4
• Fall Gas Distribution Learning Summit
  October 26-28
• PETROTECH-2010
  October 31-November 3

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SUCCESSFUL PRACTICES

"Your Career: Does Anyone Know You Are Out There? What Is Your Brand?"

Successful Practice Challenge: To move up in the organization beyond crew leader or supervisor usually means company leaders beyond your immediate department need to know who you are and have a sense of your skills, abilities, and your track record.

But what if you aren’t very well known?  What if your reputation isn’t accurate or it’s incomplete?  How do you increase your visibility without being “pushy” and overly self- promoting.  That turns people off.

Good visibility and a solid reputation do not automatically guarantee promotions, raises, and/or increased influence in the organization, but without them the future is much less bright.  Think of the brands of the products you buy.  If you know them, what they stand for, and that you can trust they time after time, then they have a solid brand in your mind.  In somewhat the same way, you have some kind of brand in your company today.  There are things you can do to make it more recognizable and enhance it so that people will rely on you (your brand) more and more.

Successful Practice Solution: Successful leaders/officers at MEA member companies and Rita Webster, Ph.D., Chief Learning Officer at www.WiseLeader.net recommend taking stock of your current situation first.  What is it that you want to be doing in the organization in 5-10 years?  Where are you in your continuing education process, your family situation, your health or the health of aging parents, for example?  What is your current reputation?  How widely known are you?  Having a sense of direction for your career and a sense of your current reputation and visibility means you can set out some action steps to help you get where you want to be.

These same experts recommend the following tactics to increase visibility and enhance your reputation:

• Do great work.  Let the work be your loudest “voice” rather than just promoting yourself.
• Let your own management, and the management of departments in your company that you would like to work in, know that you would like more responsibility or a change in the type of work you are doing or that you want new challenges.  This is not inappropriate self promotion.  Several of today’s current officers are where they are because they did this and they were pleasantly surprised that they were given assignments in totally different areas.
• Volunteer for task forces, merger integration teams, or extra assignments in your own department.  A reputation that says “this is a hard worker, not afraid of challenges and one that works well with others” is a very positive attribute.
• Take a lateral transfer.  May not be a promotion, but your work in a new department builds your visibility in the company and success there shows you are not a “one hit wonder.”
• When seeking advancement or other change, it is not only important to know why you want this, but it is also vital that the potential advantages are clear from the company’s point of view.
• Getting guidance from a sponsor/mentor, especially one that is not in your immediate chain of command, can be an important.  Sometimes it is easier to be candid about future desires with someone who is not your immediate boss.
• Know yourself.  What are your real strengths and weaknesses?  What is your actual reputation?  Can you get 360 feedback from peers, subordinates and senior people in the organization?  This will help you discover what your reputation is.  If you think it’s not accurate, you can take action in that direction.  If it is accurate, then you can look at the gaps you have to fill.
• “I can do that!”  Practical confidence in your abilities and a willingness to try new challenges is reassuring to someone more senior than you, who might be willing to give you a chance at a growth assignment.  Remember most people go with the “player” that they have the most confidence in (works in sports/works in business).  It’s also okay, however, to ask for help.  Superheroes only exist in comic books and on television.
• “I did that.” vs. “We did that.”  This is a tough one.  No one gets ahead without the support of peers and subordinates, so grabbing the credit isn’t a smart move.  It may be really tempting to let everyone know that it was really you that was the key to a major accomplishment.  Have faith that your successful participation will come out over time.  This is an area where having a sponsor or mentor elsewhere in the company can help tell your story.
• Opportunities to present to management groups - maybe even the Board of Directors - should be taken very seriously.  Well-organized and clear and concise presentations are an excellent way to enhance visibility and reputation.  To improve your skills, volunteer to make presentations to industry committees, volunteer groups, within your church, and anywhere you can enhance your skills in one-to-one and group communication.  Toastmasters can be a very helpful tool.  Find out what others think of your current skills in communication.
• Outside the company, working for United Way and other groups has a way of filtering back to your company in positive ways.  An outside leader telling your CEO that you did a great job leading a local charity’s fundraising or that you were really organized when you led the Habitat work crew last Saturday is the kind of legitimate Public Relations that can be vital to your reputation.

For more information on successful ways to increase your visibility in your organization, go to www.WiseLeader.net or contact Rita Webster at rita@wiseleader.net.  Her telephone number is (612) 722-9732.  Webster was a featured presenter at the Energetic Women Conference held July 28, 2010.  You can also go to www.midwestenergy.org and dig into the Success Bytes.  These are interviews with male and female leaders in our industry about their career progression.  Quite a few of them have specific guidance (we have tried to capture the highlights in this Successful Practice) on visibility and reputation issues.

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"Cell Phone Use by Employees While Driving Can Bring Employer Liability "

Successful Practice Challenge: Mobile communications is essential to efficiency of a modern utility or contractor.  Can any of us remember what it was like before?  Radio communication was all we had and that was usually limited to those installed in vehicles.  Now we have cell phones that are also text and internet communication tools as well.

The challenge for employers is to make sure that employees are not using these devices while driving or operating equipment.  This is not just a safety issue for the employee or those that might be injured as a result of inattention, but it is also a liability issue that is getting more and more traction in the courts.  A Florida court awarded over twenty million dollars to an automobile passenger injured in an accident because the driver of the other vehicle was a salesman for a major company.  His company paid because they were named in the lawsuit.  The issue concerns the use of both personal and company phones, pagers, and portable internet devices.

While many readers of this Successful Practice are not in a position to set policy at their companies, they are typically crew leaders, managers and officers who have direct responsibility for their own actions and that of their employees.

Successful Practice Solution: An enforceable cell phone and PDA policy that is adhered to by all levels of the company is an important step.  Chances are your company’s liability insurance company can help.  After all they are going to be paying the claims.

Here are some suggestions and recommendations:

• Recognize the risk to employee and public safety, financial cost, and public reputation of not having an organizational policy or not adhering to it.
• Create a policy that is specific to your company - it must cover all employees including senior managers and corporate officers. 
• Lead by example.  Dispatchers and supervisors should ask an employee if they are in a safe situation (not driving, not operating equipment, etc.) when they receive your call.  If not, call them back later or have them call you back.  Make sure the field force sees all management personnel following the policy.
• Don’t assume that “hands free’ solves the problem. It’s not where your hands are - it’s where your mind is.  Any distraction is a possible accident about to happen.
• Safety culture, not safety program.  Any new policy that you want to become a habit needs to be implemented and supported over time.  Remind, retrain, and reward.  Bring it up at job briefings and more formal safety briefings.

The issue covers all generations at work and all levels of the company, but younger employees are even more experienced (dependent) on their electronic communication tools.  One field manager reported a new apprentice at the top of a transmission pole texting.  The manager now collects all cell phones and pagers in the morning, returns them during lunch break and then collects them again until the close of business.

This successful practice was developed from a number of sources.  If you have a cell phone and pager policy, please forward a copy to karam@midwestenergy.org and she will post some of them to this Successful Practice.

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"Outage Management System (and others) Depend Upon Accurate Field Data Input"

Successful Practice Challenge: There are some great systems out there to improve reliability.  Outage Management Systems are one excellent example.  Being able to predict potential outages and being able to locate actual failures can help speed repairs, keep more customers on during troubled times, and provide good records of what happened after an outage.

But the system doesn’t have eyes and ears.  Field personnel are critical because they input the reasons for outages based on their expert field observations.  But making sure that data is accurate and consistent is an important task.  Without accuracy, the system can not provide the intended benefits.

Successful Practice Solution:  Tim Fulton of Vectren understands the challenges.  He wants to make sure the Vectren Outage Management System is maximized.  But he notes that without help, field personnel can incorrectly code the actual reasons for outages.

For example, if its windy, a downed wire might be coded as being due to the wind even though it was a tree branch (vegetation) that caused the line to go down.  Coding the outage that way can miss the point that vegetation in the area may need attention.  The company can’t control the wind, obviously, but it can tackle the vegetation.  Use the wrong code and the problem is blamed on the wind and no follow-up vegetation trimming occurs. 

Fulton offers the following recommendation:

Create laminated sheets that list all of the outage cause and sub-cause definitions.  Provide these to all personnel that enter data into the OMS system.  Discuss the sheets and situations like the one mentioned above in tailgate meetings to reinforce consistency and accuracy.  Explain why the proper cause coding is important. 

Outage Cause and Sub-Cause example here.

MEA thanks Tim Fulton, Reliability Engineer at Vectren, for providing this Successful Practice during the MEA Spring Electric Operations Conference in Springfield, Illinois.  Tim can be reached at tfulton@vectren.com.   

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"Protect the Service, Not Just the Meter: The Secret to Reducing Gas and Electricity Theft "

Successful Practice Challenge:  Tougher economic times and higher energy prices may be pushing businesses and consumers to steal energy by piping and wiring around the meter. While the majority of theft occurs in the residential sector, more revenue is lost in the commercial sector. Some estimates suggest that 1%-3% of revenues can be lost to theft. For a $500 million dollar revenue company, that means between $5 and $15 million dollars are lost each year. For a larger $2 billion dollar company, that’s $20 to $60 million dollars lost each year.

The sophistication of energy thieves has also increased. They have learned not to eliminate gas or electricity consumption completely and they also try to avoid detection by slowly reducing the amount of energy stolen over time. Such activity takes a more sophisticated approach to detecting theft. Even AMR enabled meters with the capability of generating tamper flags do not detect a majority of theft.

Successful Practice Solution:  Locks and seals are not enough. Neither are more vigilant meter reading and field service crews. Both are part of effective revenue protection programs, but the real “detective” is recognizing anomalous consumption. Computer models have been developed to establish expected consumption patterns.

Even with the advance in Customer Information Systems (CIS), most use only standard industry codes. So comparing two “full service restaurants” might result in false results - one could be a sandwich shop and the other a fine dining restaurant. The concept of comparing customers to determine expected consumption is a good one, but the level of sophistication must be higher.

Utilities need to know more about their commercial customers and they need to have the computer programs to analyze this information when comparing it to consumption.

Using the restaurant example again, adding information such as the square footage of the restaurant, the type of food served, whether it is a chain or not, is it an eat in restaurant, even what neighborhood is it in can help create an expected consumption pattern and allow comparisons to others of the same type.

This type of comparison can be made between retail stores, gasoline/convenience stores (car wash? restaurant?), and many other common types of commercial customers. If the utility is a combination, electric and gas distribution company, then it is easier to look at gas and electric consumption. In a laundry, for example, that has commercial washers and gas dryers, there should be a corresponding electric and gas consumption pattern.

Detectent, headquartered in San Diego, works with a number of utilities providing the tools to help companies do both “peer” comparisons - similar restaurants, for example - and “characteristic” analysis - see the laundry example above.

Michael Madrazo, CEO of Detectent, also reminds us that theft is not the only issue. Customer tampering with piping and meters can present a safety hazard for customers, the public and employees. Theft can cause increases in rates that negatively affect other paying customers.

For more information on how Detectent works with utilities, go to www.detectent.com.   

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"Misguided Energy Policy Magnifies Shock of Electric Rate Increases"
Excerpts from Robert Rio, AIM Business Insider, August 26, 2010 - http://blog.aimnet.org/AIM-IssueConnect/bid/45546/Misguided-Energy-Policy-Magnifies-Shock-of-Electric-Rate-Increases

Misguided state energy policy makes even sound rate proposals by responsible utilities hazardous to the economic health of Massachusetts. Massachusetts policymakers have created energy regulations that promote environmental policy over economic development. Decoupling, for example, allows utilities to recover revenues lost when customers reduce their electricity usage though conservation. Originally proposed by the Patrick administration, AIM has opposed decoupling as a giveaway to utilities at the expense of ratepayers. All of these government mandates will add between $6 billion and $7 billion to the electric bills of Massachusetts consumers and employers during the next several years. Almost none of those dollars will make WMECO a healthier utility or improve electric reliability for the people of western Massachusetts.

WMECO proposes a number of steps in its rate filing that will create savings for ratepayers:

• Better rate design to more accurately reflect the cost of service;
• Elimination of kWh in demand charges;
• Recognizing the value of higher load factors and effect usage patterns;
• Reducing on-peak times from 16 hours to 8 hours;
• Residential rates which encourage efficient use patterns.

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TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

"ElectricU Puts Electrical Worker Training Online - Adds Metering Courses"
PRWEB/July 2010- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4254684.htm

Midwest ENERGY Association (MEA) announces the release of 13 metering-related courses and associated Performance Evaluation Forms as part of the ElectricU lineworker training development initiative. This deployment is another milestone in the ElectricU project, a project initiated and developed by a consortium of MEA member companies. ElectricU’s new comprehensive curriculum is designed to standardize and modernize lineworker training for utilities, contractors, unions and schools. ElectricU materials can be used to complement a utility’s existing apprentice and journeyman training programs and provide updated, industry-consensus learning at a fraction of the cost of classroom training. Interested utilities, contractors, schools, and unions can obtain more information by visiting www.ElectricU.org or by contacting John Gann at (651) 289-9600 x105.

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"T+D Webcast"
Excerpts from ASTD.org, August 27, 2010 - http://www.astd.org/

Thursday, September 23 :: In this webcast, Dan Tobin, author of the ASTD book, Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline: How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders in Small to Mid-Sized Companies, will discuss how to create a competency model for your company’s future leaders and how to identify high-potential candidates for future leadership roles in your company. He will also discuss how to select from your model the key competencies you will seek in future company leaders and then how to rate current employees on their potential for those positions.

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MEA gathers the information provided in EDNS from employees of utilities, contractors and suppliers plus newspapers, magazines, news releases and Internet sites. EDNS content is offered to you with the intent of providing information, ideas, and practices that might you help you improve your personal or organizational performance. MEA, however, can not validate the information provided or guarantee any results. Each reader should individually evaluate and determine whether the information provided is appropriate for their organization.