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For Hispanic Heritage Month, Julio Torrado, the Director of Human Resources and Communications at Florida public power utility KEYS Energy Services, returned to his alma mater, Key West High School, to speak with students, sharing his life story and detailing career opportunities at the utility.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Oct. 16 announced the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office closed a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of American Electric Power, which will reconductor and rebuild around 5,000 miles of transmission lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
Lightshift Energy, a developer, owner and operator of battery energy storage projects across the U.S., and KeyBanc Capital Markets (KBCM), on Oct. 16 announced the close of a $75 million credit facility that will support Lightshift’s rapidly growing pipeline of energy storage projects across the East Coast.
For water and electric utilities, it is critical to communicate with customers about potential leaks, rate changes and outages. Speed and clarity are essential to ensuring water is not wasted and customers know about outages. This boosts customer satisfaction. The use of texting by the City of Bryan, Texas, and Bryan Texas Utilities has yielded a wide range of benefits.
Kentucky public power utility Frankfort Plant Board is seeking proposals to meet all capacity and energy requirements associated with its retail load beginning June 1, 2029.
Plans were unveiled on Oct. 15 for Project Horizon, a two-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus in West Texas.
Utilities face several challenges as they address an increasing number of outages. As customers grapple with these rising power interruptions, 65% report that they’re frustrated with utilities’ impersonal communications. However, utilities can now address this communications challenge by taking advantage of AI. Rather than simply reacting to outages as they happen, power providers can embrace intelligent, customized, and proactive messaging that humanizes these crises for their customers.
Two separate reports recently released by the New York Independent System Operator "provide important insights into evolving challenges of maintaining reliability of the high voltage electric system as consumer demand increases and generation retires," the grid operator said on Oct. 14.