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Utility Modernization & Critical Infrastructure Insights
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 676 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
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Grid Reliability
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
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
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
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
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
The Plot Twist Nobody Was Ready For: Amazon Just Outbid a Utility for a Mega Solar Project
Why a $1 Million Bid Difference Should Worry Every Energy Leader Utilities Are No longer the Only Serious Buyers of Clean Capacity Puget Sound Energy (PSE), a utility in the Pacific Northwest, bid $82 million for a massive solar-plus-storage project in Oregon. Amazon bid $83 million and won. In an $82–$83 million auction, $1 million can look like noise. It isn’t. It’s proof that the buyer pool has changed, and utilities are bidding against companies with urgent load growth an
5 min read
Google’s Grid Warning: Why Transmission Is the Real Threat to U.S. Grid Reliability.
AI data centers are exposing the quiet bottleneck utilities can’t outrun: the wires, the queues, and the legacy systems behind them. Transmission Explained: The Grid’s Highways Most people talk about the grid like it’s one thing. It isn’t. It’s three big layers that do three different jobs. Generation is where electricity is made (power plants, wind, solar, batteries). Transmission is how that electricity moves long distances (the high-voltage “backbone”). And lastly, distrib
5 min read
A Modular Data Center Strategy Built for Tornado Alley
How Tamazari helped Rural Electric Co-ops Deploy 59+ “Mini Data Centers” in 6 Months SUMMARY Between 2010 and 2017, Tamazari personnel helped KAMO Power and its member cooperatives stand up a practical answer to a very modern problem: “How do we run a smarter, more resilient grid without building traditional data centers everywhere?” The team deployed 59+ modular computing facilities across rural Oklahoma and Missouri using a mix of containerized data centers, GFRC prefabrica
4 min read
From Data Chaos to Grid Clarity: GIS Load Forecasting for Smarter Distribution System Planning
How Tamazari Helped 9+ Utilities Use LoadSEER to Pinpoint Load Hotspots and Plan Upgrades Ahead of Electrification SUMMARY Tamazari led project management for a multi-utility implementation program of LoadSEER, a spatial load forecasting platform from Integral Analytics. This tool helps planners predict where electric demand will grow and by how much. Across 9+ major utilities, we converted complex data environments into actionable, map-based forecasting insights. These insig
4 min read
Why “Just Build More Fiber” Is The AI-Era Myth
How Tamazari built a utility-grade Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Backbone that Delivered 99.9995% Grid Reliability SUMMARY When your communications network hiccups, the grid doesn’t just “slow down”—operators lose visibility, automation gets compromised, and storm response becomes harder right when the public needs utilities most. To increase bandwidth and resilience without the cost and lead time of building new fiber, KAMO Power and Tacoma Public Utilities moderni
3 min read
AI Is Quietly Rewriting Grid Reliability—and Texas Is the Warning Shot
Some Data Centers Now Demand as Much Power as Entire Cities A Number That Changes Everything If you want to understand where grid reliability is headed over the next decade, forget abstract forecasts and glossy net-zero scenarios for a moment. Look instead at a single number coming out of Texas: 226 gigawatts. That’s not a long-term projection or a speculative scenario. It’s the approximate volume of large-load interconnection requests currently sitting in the ERCOT queue, mu
4 min read
Engineering Reliable Telecommunications in Polar Bear Country
How Tamazari Kept Essential Services Running Amid Ice, Isolation, and Wildlife Risks SUMMARY Tamazari supported AT&T Alascom in keeping communications running for more than 300 remote Alaskan villages. Despite extreme weather, limited access, wildlife risks, and tight budgets, the team maintained stable analog satellite service backed by a centralized hub: Eagle River Earth Station. These systems delivered dependable phone lines, basic internet, and emergency communication f
3 min read
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