Interest Groups
The North American Dense Urban Utilities Working Group (NADUUWG)
An interest group that brings together representatives from utilities that serve densely populated urban centers to share practices and to discuss and pursue solutions to specific challenges.
The interest group was the brainchild of a small group of utilities dedicated to facing the challenges and constraints of meeting their projected demand and service needs with older underground system designs. These challenges include high costs of redundant systems for maintaining N-1 or better service levels, increasing fault currents, aging equipment, limited physical space to expand the system traditionally, low equipment utilization factors, and sharp growth in new load types and distributed generation. –>
EPRI facilitates the interest group, which is open to all utility companies. Meetings typically are hosted by a participating utility and include presentations from all companies present. Discussions focus on functional issues, practices, and on industry challenges and potential solutions. In most cases the host company offers a field tour. Sessions are closed to vendors, suppliers and consultants. On occasion, a session following the meeting may target a technology and include vendor(s) specifically to provide a deep dive into that technology.
The North American Dense Urban Utilities Working Group offers the opportunity to share practices associated with managing urban underground systems with peer companies. The requirements for each participant are:
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Prepare and deliver a presentation on a topic associated with urban underground/network systems (15 min. + 10 min. of Q&A).
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Sign a non-disclosure agreement, to ensure that the information shared among the group stays within the group.
Undergrounding for Distribution Interest Group (U-DIG)
U-DIG is an interest group that focuses on industry collaboration to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs associated with proactively converting overhead facilities to underground. For more information on U-DIG and our past webcasts, please visit our U-DIG site for more info!
For more information, contact John Tripolitis, EPRI Program Manager, at either 610.385.0884 or jtripolitis@epri.com, or the EPRI Customer Assistance Center at either 800.313.3774 or askepri@epri.com.