Development for the electric utilities networks towards the national information infrastructure

With an increasing competitive environment, electric utility companies face a window of both necessity and opportunity. The necessity to investigate and assess the information and telecommunications capabilities they will need to be competitive in their main operations, and the opportunity to consider new sources of revenue that such capabilities may make possible. Irrespective of approach a utility takes to integrating its main activities with the emerging information superhighway, only a confluence of energy and information technologies can meet the national challenge of efficiently managing energy demand, supply and transmission. Utilities will be driven to become more competitive in deploying both supply-side and demand side energy information services in order to control access to the customer and prevent erosion of their customer base. However at the same time, utilities have the potential to become significant players in the communications field especially towards the superhighway by providing nonenergy value added services through telecommunications infrastructures. Structuring a telecommunications architecture and strategy for a particular utility is difficult because it involves many interconnected technological, economic, competitive and financial considerations. This considers these key points including telecommunications networks, supply side information services and energy information services. The changes in architecture and technologies of communications systems leading to new services plus additional attributes to current services is covered