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The Historic Shift Behind Oregon’s Schedule 96
How Oregon Made Data Center Cost Responsibility a Matter of Law What Makes Oregon’s Schedule 96 Different Oregon did not create America’s first data center tariff. It did something potentially more consequential by requiring utilities to separate large data center costs from everyone else’s bills. 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
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The Historic Shift Behind Oregon’s Schedule 96
How Oregon Made Data Center Cost Responsibility a Matter of Law What Makes Oregon’s Schedule 96 Different Oregon did not create America’s first data center tariff. It did something potentially more consequential by requiring utilities to separate large data center costs from everyone else’s bills. 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
6 min read
The Real AI Power Risk Is Hidden in the Handoff
How NERC’s August 3rd Deadline Turns Operational Readiness into a Burden of Proof The Deadline Behind the AI Power Debate The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) August 3 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 U.S. electric
5 min read
How Utilities Can Prepare for the Large-Load Tariff Era
Data Centers and 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
4 min read
From 1940s Drawings to Real-Time Transmission Visibility
A Case Study in Turning 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
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—and harder to shift. 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 fro
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 Little if Bills Rise and Trust Falls 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 expensiv
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
A Case Study in 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. Tamazari supported
5 min read
What it Takes to Get a Major Transit Fleet World Cup-Ready
Inside the Fleet Telematics Rollout Powering Safer, More Reliable Public Transit in Houston When people think about fleet telematics, they often picture dashboards, alerts, and cameras. What they don’t always see is the bigger story. In public transit especially, telematics isn’t just about visibility. It’s about protecting drivers, moving people safely, and making sure a city can deliver when the world shows up at its doorstep. That’s exactly what makes Tamazari’s work in Ho
4 min read
Helping NYSDOT Get More from Telematics
How Tamazari's Turns Samsara’s Capabilities into Everyday Operational Gains Telematics starts creating value once the platform is live, but that value doesn't fully show up on day one. It grows over time, as supervisors learn which reports actually matter, alerts reach the right people, training aligns with real job responsibilities, and teams have the support they need to handle more complex requests without slowing down. That's when fleet technology starts to become part of
3 min read
Why Innovative Transmission Tower Design Could Be the Key to Faster Grid Expansion
In the Race to Modernize the Grid, Perception is Becoming Part of Performance Why Transmission Tower Design is a Grid Modernization Issue The biggest barrier to building more transmission isn't always the steel, the permitting, or even the cost. Sometimes it's the moment a community looks up and decides the project doesn't belong there. That's the blind spot in a lot of grid planning. We talk about transmission as an engineering challenge, but in practice it's also a design c
5 min read
How Utility Fleets Can Cut Equipment Loss with Mesh Beacon Tracking
Make your Fleet Part of the Search Party The Hidden Tax in Utility Operations is Still “Where is it?” Ask any utility fleet or field leader what slows work down, and you’ll hear the usual suspects: parts, permitting, staffing, weather. Then the honest answer shows up in the gaps between those words. It’s the scavenger hunt. Here's what that looks like on a daily basis: A crew rolls to a job and the right tool is not on the truck. A portable generator is “somewhere in the yard
5 min read
Agentic AI is the Next Leap in Utility Fleet Management
From Alerts to Action: Inside the Telematics Workflow Shift The Hidden Cost of Micro-Choices Your Fleet Team Makes Daily Most utility fleets already have visibility. You can see harsh braking, idle time, speeding events, and where every truck is located. The problem is that visibility still depends on humans to turn a signal into a decision, and then turn that decision into action. As a result, alerts stack up, managers triage late, and the response becomes reactive. By the t
6 min read
Different Logo, Same Guts: The White-Label Telematics Problem Fleets Ignore
The Scariest Telematics Risk Isn’t What Your Dashboard Shows—It’s What Your Vendor Contract Doesn’t Who Really Built Your Telematics? The Visibility Gap Fleets Ignore Picture this. Your fleet team buys “Vendor A” for heavy trucks, “Vendor B” for light-duty vehicles, and “Vendor C” for trailers. Three brands. Three dashboards. You feel diversified. Then an outage hits. Updates fail in the same way. The same weird bug shows up across all three. And suddenly you realize the unco
5 min read
The “Plug-In Solar” Moment Is Here, and One Safety Standard Is About to Make It Mainstream
UL 3700 is the behind-the-scenes rulebook that turns balcony solar from a risky gray area into a scalable, utility-friendly product Why can you plug in a space heater, but not a solar panel? Balcony solar sounds like a simple “hang it, plug it in, save money” idea. The truth is more complex. This article uncovers why UL 3700 can turn plug-in solar from a clever hack into a trusted mass-market product. But first, here are a few key definitions that matter to understand what's
5 min read
A 555°F Geothermal Well in Utah Could Make 24/7 Clean Power Real
Hotter Rock, Faster Drilling, and a Clearer Path to Always-on Clean Energy Geothermal Just Dropped a Stat Grid Planners Can’t Ignore Every once in a while, a single number cuts through the noise and forces the grid conversation to get real. That just happened in Utah. Fervo says it confirmed a geothermal resource above 555°F, and it drilled the appraisal well in under 11 days.[1] On the surface, that sounds like an impressive engineering milestone. In practice, it’s a potenti
5 min read
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