Since 2010, an estimated 10,000 babyboomers have reached retirement age every day and will continue to do so until 2030, including many workers in the power generation and oil and gas industries. As the energy industry watches its core workforce prepare for retirement, it’s faced with replacing valuable years of knowledge and acquired talent from a limited pipeline.
In the last decade, the energy industry has struggled to attract new talent to backfill open positions. Millennials and generation Z, the youngest entrants into the workforce, are opting to pursue non-conventional energy careers in computer science and consumer technology, rather than in plant engineering, operations or management. Some also associate the traditional industrial landscape with large-scale accidents and resulting environmental concerns, making it difficult to encourage them to seek job opportunities that are open.
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The fragile Potomac Watershed – stretching from southern Pennsylvania to Virginia and encompassing parts of West Virginia and Washington, D.C. – is 54.6 percent forest and home to 6.1 million people. Its preservation has been a cause célèbre since water pollution levels killed thousands of fish and closed the river down for recreational uses like swimming and boating. By 1951, the venerable Washington Post called the Potomac River an open sewer. Conservation and cleanup efforts have been regular events for the watershed’s residents ever since, and educating current and future generations is the key to protecting the area from unnecessary harm.
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Archaic timers, manual valves and aging irrigation infrastructure are costing businesses too much money and time. That’s because traditional landscape irrigation systems provide little visibility into how much or when water is used. Grounds maintenance teams might not find out about a system leak for hours, sometimes days. Sudden weather systems that dump inches of rain can go unnoticed, so the systems continue with their regularly-scheduled watering. The result is excessive watering and runoff that can kill plants and damage building foundations, parking lots and other hardscapes.
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Many Utilities are struggling with the challenges of hardening their systems against the increasingly destructive powers of intense weather while tackling ever-increasing customer and regulatory performance expectations. Current storm-hardening programs typically trend toward two general areas: enhancing distribution systems and protecting substations against flooding. While distribution enhancements and selective undergrounding represent the initial stage of storm-hardening programs, they also represent limited high-gain/“low hanging fruit” opportunities that are an obvious starting point for two reasons.
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Utility companies today face an environment full of challenges and uncertainty. Transformational forces are driving the entire industry to make significant changes in order to adapt. These changes require utilities to reconsider their preparedness in the face of a crisis, which can hit an organization in many different ways: a security breach, regulatory non-compliance and even weather-related disasters. As the industry transforms, and executives seek to grow their businesses and streamline processes, new vulnerabilities and threats arise. If not handled carefully, these weaknesses can lead to organizational crises and damaging outcomes. Gone are the days of merely having a crisis plan in place. Today, adapting to change, uncertainty – and even crisis – requires a cross-functional, integrated and dynamic plan to ensure it will be effective regardless of the issue.
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Even if you don’t fully understand what the “smart grid” is, no doubt you have heard the term. It could be argued that the smart grid is the result of a technological evolution within the electricity supply chain, where reliability and quality have been improved by the adoption of modern technology, particularly communications technology. But there are a few game-changing concepts that take this evolution idea to another level. One such concept is that of the microgrid.
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Renewable energy (RE) and energy storage are two families of technology that seek to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependence. To better understand the role of copper in renewables and energy storage, the Copper Development Association (CDA) commissioned two studies, which not only examine copper’s function but also provide insights into energy infrastructures.
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New methods of natural gas and oil production have unlocked new supplies from shale formations around the United States over the last two decades, and these new supply sources have brought about rapid changes in the transportation infrastructure needed to bring these supplies to market. Pipeline developers – whether moving oil, natural gas or natural gas liquids (NGL) – have sought to keep up with the increasing volume and changing production locations by building new infrastructure and repurposing existing pipelines. The origin points for new and repurposed pipelines are often in areas historically lacking large-scale pipeline infrastructure. In some cases new production locations were previously destinations or through-points for oil, gas and NGL pipelines before the shale production boom.
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