by Jeff Ihnen | Feb 18, 2025 | Energy Rant
Over the many years I have taught electrification basics for the Wisconsin Public Utilities Institute’s (WPUI) Energy Utilities Basics course, I dive deeply into heat pumps and their impact on the grid. I explain the messy chart in Figure 1 like a palm reader, except...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jan 20, 2021 | Energy Rant
We’re going off-road this week, inspired by some things I read in The Zweig Letter. The title of the article is Decentralization to be more Agile and Adaptable. The term distributed employee resources (DERs) comes to mind. This is especially timely as a follow up to...
by Jeff Ihnen | Apr 15, 2019 | Energy Rant
This blog features dozens of posts regarding the nuances, obscurities, and upside down world of the public utility industry. To wit, every other industry provides things people need or want at the lowest possible price in competition with dozens or even hundreds of...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jan 9, 2017 | Energy Rant
Last week I wrote about understanding the customer and knowing what they want, whether the customer is the utility, regulator, or the end user of energy. Taking this a step beyond, the customer/client may not know what they want. For example, a hypothetical customer...
by Jeff Ihnen | Dec 19, 2016 | Energy Rant
A couple years ago at an AESP conference, we had a fascinating speaker and topic. It was one of those that had me thinking deeply and philosophically. The subject was technology and the future. The takeaway: every problem is either a technical problem or one of human...
