From Authority to Trusted Advisor: The Utility's Changing Role
Utilities will need more and more capable customers who take greater ownership of their energy and make good decisions with regards to the product, service, and program innovations that enable energy ownership. Trusted advisors, whether live or automated, who are credible, reliable, intimate, and customer oriented, can help customers with these choices in a way that establishes a stronger relationship between customer and utility.
Building a Social Roadmap for the Smart Grid
The utility industry has done a relatively good job of establishing technical roadmaps for the Smart Grid. What's needed now is a social roadmap, which provides direction for how people should use the Smart Grid. With a social roadmap, three things are clear: we must understand the customer experiences, we must transform the customer relationship, and we must drive customer engagement.
Ceramic microwave antennas for mobile applications
Due to their medium to high permittivity values, ceramic microwave materials are attractive as building blocks for miniaturised antenna solutions. Further advantages are low dielectric losses and an excellent temperature stability of standard ceramic materials. Yet, the permittivity of the ceramic material also has a strong influence on the radiation efficiency and bandwidth of the antenna. This implies that in the design process a suitable compromise has to be found between the degree of miniaturisation on the one hand and the antenna efficiency and bandwidth on the other. We describe two approaches towards efficient miniaturised ceramic microwave antennas: the dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with partial metallisation and the shorting post patch antenna. We focus on design steps taken to ensure both a high degree of miniaturisation and high values of the radiation efficiency, the choice of the ceramic material and the experimental performance of the antennas.