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Water Utility SCADA Modernization: Connecting Plant Operations and Citywide Decision-Making
How Tamazari helped Lynchburg deploy Ignition into 10 active projects supporting operations, maintenance, reporting and administration SUMMARY The City of Lynchburg Department of Water Resources needed more from its operational technology. Two aging SCADA systems were becoming difficult to maintain, connecting new equipment was challenging, and limited access to data and automation slowed everyday work. By adopting Ignition, the department improved plant visibility and contro
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Water Utility SCADA Modernization: Connecting Plant Operations and Citywide Decision-Making
How Tamazari helped Lynchburg deploy Ignition into 10 active projects supporting operations, maintenance, reporting and administration SUMMARY The City of Lynchburg Department of Water Resources needed more from its operational technology. Two aging SCADA systems were becoming difficult to maintain, connecting new equipment was challenging, and limited access to data and automation slowed everyday work. By adopting Ignition, the department improved plant visibility and contro
3 min read
How Do Utilities Integrate Samsara With SAP? 7 Things to Get Right
Tamazari’s lessons from connecting fleet telematics, SAP HR and utility operations Overview: Tamazari helped a major PNW utility modernize their fleet spanning more than 1,000 vehicles. Tamazari led a deployment that included an SAP HR integration that automatically synchronized driver information as employees joined, left, or changed roles. That implementation offers a useful blueprint for utilities considering how Samsara and SAP should work together. 1. Start With the Busi
4 min read
Solar SCADA Modernization: Bringing More Than 30 Sites onto One Platform
How Tamazari used Ignition to unify Ecoplexus solar operations, improve performance visibility and reduce monitoring costs SUMMARY Managing a solar portfolio becomes harder when every site presents a different picture. Ecoplexus faced that challenge across more than 30 solar sites, where disconnected data acquisition systems limited visibility, customization and access to operational information. Ecoplexus consolidated its sites onto a single Ignition SCADA platform. The proj
3 min read
Utility Billing Modernization: Why Complex Rate Changes Require the Right Professional Services Partner
Managing the Messy Path from Complex Rates to Reliable Bills Overview: As electricity rates and grid investments reshape customer costs, utilities need coordinated implementation across systems, data and teams to deliver accurate bills customers can understand. “I Used Less. Why Is My Electric Bill Higher?” A customer turns off unnecessary lights, adjusts the thermostat, buys efficient appliances and waits until later to run the laundry. They are doing what utilities have enc
3 min read
When Wildfire Risk Rises, Tamazari Helps Utilities See and Act Faster
A Practical Approach to Wildfire Mitigation, Situational Awareness and Grid Resilience Overview: Smaller utilities do not need billion-dollar grid-hardening programs to get serious about wildfire readiness. They need better visibility, targeted automation, stronger asset data and a practical path from wildfire risk to action. Why Wildfire Mitigation is Especially Challenging for Small Utilities For years, wildfire risk in the utility industry was treated as a Western problem,
4 min read
How Utilities Can Build a Smarter Funding Strategy
Making Grants and Utility Capital Work Together Overview: Tamazari's practical guide to combining grants, public funding and utility capital into one coordinated modernization strategy. The federal push to modernize the grid has been building for nearly five years. In 2021, Congress created the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, authorizing up to $10.5 billion to help utilities, states, Tribes and other orga
9 min read
Turning Winter Fleet Data into Airfield Readiness
How Tamazari Strengthened Airport Snow and Ice Management with Samsara Telematics SUMMARY As part of the second phase of a five-year enterprise telematics strategy, the Metropolitan Airports Commission engaged Tamazari to help configure and operationalize Samsara across 691 vehicles and assets, including 207 pieces of snow-and-ice equipment. We helped turn their technology deployment into a governed, usable operational system. The engagement connected fleet data with airport
6 min read
Five Steps Toward Safer, More Resilient Water Utilities
How Water Utilities Can Prepare SCADA for an Active Cyber Threat Overview: After attacks affected water systems across multiple states, the priority is no longer general cyber awareness. It's protecting control, maintaining safe operations, and recovering with confidence. Cyber Threats to Water Systems are Dramatically Increasing The cyber threat facing water utilities changed significantly in 2026. On April 7, the EPA, FBI, CISA, and NSA issued an urgent joint advisory warni
8 min read
The Historic Shift Behind Schedule 96
How Oregon Changed Who Pays for Data Center Growth What Makes Oregon’s Schedule 96 Different For years, utilities have created special rates and contracts for customers that use extraordinary amounts of electricity. More recently, regulators across the country have approved new large-load tariffs designed for data centers, advanced manufacturing facilities and other customers whose power needs can reshape the grid. Oregon’s Schedule 96 is part of that broader movement. It is
6 min read
AI’s Power Problem Isn’t Just Capacity. It’s Proof.
NERC’s August 3rd Deadline Exposes the Hidden Reliability Risk in Broken Operational Handoffs The Deadline Behind the AI Power Debate The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) August 3rd deadline is turning AI grid risk from a future concern into a present-tense test. For the last two years, the energy conversation around AI has been dominated by one question. Can the grid produce enough power? It's a fair question. Data centers consumed about 4.4% of total
5 min read
How Utilities Can Prepare for the Large-Load Tariff Era
New Regulations Are Rewriting the Rules of Readiness The Large-Load Tariff Boom is Here For years, the energy conversation around artificial intelligence focused on one question. Can the grid produce enough power? The next challenge is deciding who pays for the infrastructure required to deliver that electricity. Understandably, regulators do not want those costs quietly passed to households and small businesses. The large-load tariff is the utility sector’s first major attem
4 min read
From 1940s Drawings to Real-Time Transmission Visibility
How Tamazari Turned Legacy Records into Faster Decisions and Stronger Field Readiness SUMMARY A large Pacific Northwest utility brought Tamazari in to support a major Transmission GIS modernization initiative focused on one urgent goal: making transmission asset information easier to find, trust, and use. The work transformed decades of legacy transmission line drawings, some dating back to the 1940s, into a standardized digital foundation connected across SAP, Smallworld GIS
5 min read
The 20-Megawatt Question: Who Pays When AI Plugs In?
Schedule 96 is Making the Infrastructure Costs Behind Massive Data Center Loads Harder to Hide Schedule 96 Turns the AI Power Debate into a Billing Debate For the last year, the energy conversation around AI has mostly sounded like a grid planning problem. Can utilities build enough generation? Can transmission keep up? Those questions still matter, but Oregon’s new large-load tariff shows where the debate is headed next. The AI power debate is moving from the grid planning r
5 min read
Inside the Bitcoin Conference 2026: A Conversation with Tamazari's Director of Client Partnerships
Bitcoin 2026 Revealed a Bigger Infrastructure Story For years, Bitcoin has been framed through price, adoption, and belief. At Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, another story came into focus—Bitcoin is becoming an infrastructure business. That was the biggest takeaway for Tamazari’s Director of Client Partnerships, Brandon Mueller, who attended the event to better understand where the industry is headed. Across the conference, conversations kept moving beyond crypto. The real center
3 min read
From Military SATCOM to Utility IT: How Tim "Boss" Bagwell Delivers Mission-Critical Infrastructure
A Q&A with Tim Bagwell, far left, Senior Solutions Consultant, Tamazari Q: Tim, before we get into the consulting work, take us back to the start. What was your role in the Air Force? A: I spent roughly 1998 to 2005 in the Air Force as a satellite communications technician. By the end I was a Staff Sergeant running a small team. The shorthand is "SATCOM," but the practical reality was setting up and maintaining the data links that let dispersed units talk to each other and to
4 min read
Water Treatment SCADA with Ignition: Modernizing Plant Operations
Executive Summary A regional water treatment operator managing 12 drinking water plants and 8 wastewater treatment facilities across a 150-kilometer service area faced mounting challenges with its aging, fragmented SCADA infrastructure. Legacy systems from multiple vendors created data silos, manual reporting consumed hundreds of staff hours annually, and the lack of remote monitoring capabilities meant that operators had to physically travel to sites for routine checks, even
8 min read
AI Coaching Could Be the Missing Link in Fleet Safety
What Samsara’s Latest AI Release Reveals about Coaching at Scale The Real Fleet Safety Bottleneck is the Coaching Queue Fleet safety has entered an interesting moment. Most fleets can capture events, flag the behavior, and store the footage. What they often cannot do is turn that flood of information into timely coaching for every driver before the next mistake happens. In other words, the safety problem is no longer just on the road. It's in the review queue. A fleet manag
5 min read
Bills, Blackouts, and Broken Trust: The 5 Biggest Consumer Concerns About the Future of Energy
Modernization Means Nothing if Energy Bills Keep Rising Why Consumers are Losing Trust in the Future of Energy For years, the future of energy has been framed like a strategy deck. It was about modernization, decarbonization, grid transformation, and innovation roadmaps. But that's not how most consumers experience it day to day. They experience it through rate increases, a long outage, a confusing rebate page, or the creeping feeling that the system is getting more expensive
5 min read
Telematics is Exposing the Biggest Blind Spot in Auto Insurance
How Real Driving Data is Replacing Broad Assumptions about Safety Auto insurance has always been a prediction business. For decades, carriers priced risk using indirect signals, such as where someone lives, how old they are, their driving history, their vehicle type, and how many miles they said they expected to drive. Those factors still matter. They also leave insurers estimating risk from a distance. Telematics changes that. Usage-based insurance adds a more direct layer b
5 min read
The Data-Driven Future of Utility Vegetation Management is Here
Inside Tamazari's Approach to Proactive Planning, Wildfire Mitigation, and Reliability SUMMARY A large Pacific Northwest utility needed a smarter way to manage vegetation risk across its transmission and distribution network. The goal was not simply to trim more trees. It was to make better decisions about where vegetation posed the highest wildfire risk, where budgets should be focused, and how the organization could turn field and system data into actionable planning. Tamaz
5 min read
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