Advanced Energy Perspectives

This post was originally published on Energized, CPS Energy's blog, and is reposted here with permission.

“Architecture specific, vendor neutral.”

That was the key message from Raiford Smith, CPS Energy’s vice-president of corporate development and planning, to more than two dozen companies, ranging from Fortune 500 firms like Microsoft, Siemens, AT&T, Verizon and Rackspace, to fast-growing, new-energy economy companies like Omnetric, EnerNOC, OPower and Nest Labs, which gathered in San Antonio recently to discuss potential partnerships.

This update is cross-posted from CPS Energy's blog Energized and is written by Tracy Idell Hamilton, a project manager with CPS Energy.

For more than a century, utilities have operated with one overarching goal: to provide reliable power to their customers.

That mission, by its very nature, has meant taking a conservative approach to innovation and technology.

But the energy industry is changing rapidly, and the old way of doing things — building centralized fossil fuel power plants that send power along a grid largely unchanged from Thomas Edison’s day — are no longer sufficient.