Recent Posts by Kathleen Wolf Davis

In the last few years, it feels like the utilities industry has weathered a lot of weather, you might say. Forest fires have been devastating. Polar temperatures have been record-shattering. Hurricanes have been crippling.  Flooding has been damaging. And, while utility and emergency workers rescue and fix and brave the elements, those important first response efforts cannot be a utility’s singular focus during this emergency. There still remains a need to share with the...

Oracle OpenWorld, happening right now in our hometown of San Francisco, brings together the best and the brightest of Oracle people and Oracle customers to talk about all the possibilities of the future—from bad to good and back again—and how to plan for those possibilities.  Here in Oracle’s utilities-focused group, the man most in sync with all those plans and possibilities is Senior Vice President and General Manager Rodger Smith. So, we sat down for a short chat with...

Customer-centric thinking and how to get those valuable utility customers to understand and dive deeper into their energy use—and maybe conserve or perhaps flip to a time-of-use rate or join in a demand-side management/energy efficiency program—starts in one spot: the customer bill. During the “Update Your Bill from the Customer’s Point of View: Reimaging the Utility Bill” session at the E Source Forum 2019 this week in Denver, the speakers, including Oracle customer Nashville ...

  Oracle OpenWorld, happening this week in our hometown of San Francisco, brings together the best and the brightest of Oracle people and Oracle customers to talk about all the possibilities of the future—from bad to good and back again—and how to plan for those possibilities. Here in Oracle’s utilities-focused group, the man most in sync with all those plans and possibilities is Senior Vice President and General Manager Rodger Smith. So, we sat down for a short chat with...

You know you’re in the deep, juicy middle of a good conversation when you just can’t stop the laughter, and my talk with Paula Gold-Williams and Felecia Etheridge from CPS Energy brimmed with good humor—about their time in the industry, about their work with mentoring other women (and dudes, too) and about how funny life really is when you sit down and try to work out, backward, just how you got here. For a quick and dirty background before we go backward: Gold-Williams took...

To paraphrase/update that old Tears for Fears song: Everybody wants to change the world. ("Ruling" it may not be for all, really.) We wanted to see just how our own hardworking team of insiders, experts, data scientists, thought leaders, and utility industry activists were doing just that. So, we put together one amazing infographic on our numbers, from customer outages significantly truncated to energy (and money) saved to how far we're reaching with our #thecloudreigns...

The Cloud comic Vol. 2 is out! To celebrate, we bring back a favorite of our comic-themed blogs today.    Wonder Woman saved Steve Trevor (and at least one war). The Avengers saved New York—at least the parts they didn’t flatten. (Last year, they tried to save the world, but we won’t talk about that sad story today; we'll let you catch Endgame for that tale.) Green Lantern saved the universe once before he became Deadpool, and Dr. Strange tried to save multiple timeline...

We’ve been talking about showcasing Kansas City Power & Light’s (KCP&L’s) innovative automation thinking for about a year. Months of meetings and planning. Days of shooting video onsite. Weeks of post-production to get it all just right and here we are. It’s a wrap. If you haven’t seen the video, click here. For more behind-the-scenes details  and photos read on. SOUNDBITE: Twenty years ago, everything was on paper. We were taking phone calls from customers, trying to find those...

If the producers of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and its sequel “Revenge of the Electric Car” completed the trilogy—as all good films come in at least a three-movie box set these days—they should title it “The Rise of the Electric Car.” (And they should call Arnold fresh off his turn as fake car salesman Howard Kleiner.) In a bit over a decade since that first documentary, my how things have changed. Today, the numbers predict massive—you could even say explosive—growth in...