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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
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Grid Reliability
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
Oregon’s New Data Center Tariff Could Change Who Pays for AI Growth
Schedule 96 is Drawing a Clearer Line Between Grid Growth and Customer Costs 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 room to the custome
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 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
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
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
4 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 Rural Electric Co-ops Deployed 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 prefabricated buildings,
4 min read
From Data Chaos to Grid Clarity: GIS Load Forecasting for Distribution System Planning at Scale
How 9+ Utilities Used LoadSEER to Pinpoint Load Hotspots and Plan Upgrades Ahead of Electrification SUMMARY Utilities can’t modernize what they can’t see. 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 f
4 min read
Why “Just Build More Fiber” Is The AI-Era Myth.
How a utility-grade Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) backbone delivered 99.9995% reliability without waiting on new fiber builds. 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 Utili
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 Reliability in Polar Bear Country
How Operators 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
3 min read
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