Big investment firm Blackstone Group has reportedly shuttered its planned $500 million green fund after raising only $90 million – a sign that, amidst new green funds being raised, the sector’s weaknesses are also scaring some investors away. Read more »
Moving from the current wireless standard ZigBee to the next-generation ZigBee standard dubbed “Smart Energy Profile 2.0″ is going to be a very big deal for utilities, and smart grid firms. Now we’ve got three months to map out the transition. Read more »
Greentech VC hit $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2011, the second-highest quarter on record. Is that a sign of renewed investor confidence, or a sign that greentech IPOs are weak? Read more »
Trash king Waste Management has joined a $22 million investment in startup Agilyx, which has technology to turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill into a synthetic crude oil. The garbage and recycling company has one of the more interesting investing strategies out there. Read more »
What’s the purpose of the billion-dollar plus smart grid acquisition surge? According to Schneider Electric, it’s around developing the capacity to be a “true smart grid provider,” which includes procuring energy as well as using IT to manage the grid. Read more »
GE’s plan to buy a 90-percent stake in big French electrification and automation player Converteam for $3.2 billion could open up new opportunities to use electricity to replace fossil-fueled power. Read more »
Where do the worlds of smart grid and smart buildings overlap? Over in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro, I review how two big acquisitions last week shed light on just how muddy that line has become. Read more »
HP Labs has unveiled the company’s first foray into the crowded world of home energy management technology. The tech taps into the cloud, and uses a fresh way to display complicated energy-saving facts, but what will HP ultimately do with its experiment? Read more »
How will PG&E’s plan to turn off smart meter radios for complaining customers — and charge them extra for service — affect its smart meter plans, and others around the country? Here’s 3 things I’m paying attention to: Read more »
Pacific Gas & Electric has chosen an option for customers who think their smart meter radios might be a health risk: just turn off the radios, and pay the extra charges of having them read manually. Read more »
Can the cloud handle the energy and smart meter data of an entire country? The U.K. is working on several nationwide smart meter data clearinghouse projects that could be a start, and companies like IBM are targeting the market. Read more »
A new rule giving demand response “negawatts” an equal price as megawatts of generated power on energy markets is meant to make the grid more efficient and power more affordable. But what if it backfires? Read more »
French power giant Alstom is buying smart grid software developer UISOL, as it chases competitor Honeywell into an open source way to automate demand response: turning down buildings’ power use to manage peak loads. But how open will OpenADR be after it’s folded in? Read more »
Quiet smart grid player Digi International is already providing networking for some of the best-known names in the industry, and it’s aiming to move into the emerging world of cloud-based smart grid services and applications as well. Read more »
China is either the greatest opportunity or the greatest threat the U.S. green technology industry has ever faced — or, according to Chinese greentech experts at Wednesday’s Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, somewhere in between. Read more »
French environmental giant Veolia has named the first five startup partners in its “innovation acceleration” program, ranging from wastewater recovery and environmental management to green transportation and city network modeling. Read more »
The federal grid regulator has ruled that the “negawatts” delivered by demand response companies deserve the same market prices as megawatts of generated energy — a ruling that could pay huge dividends for the demand response industry. Read more »
Pacific Gas & Electric is going to have to come up with a non-wireless alternative for customers afraid of what low-power wireless meters might do to their health. What are its options? Read more »
Clean Edge’s new report lays out five trends that could drive the next decade’s green markets, from those relying on hard, cold economic realities to others susceptible to changing government mandates or consumers preferences. Read more »
Khosla-backed startup KiOR has a new customer for the biocrude it hopes to start producing in 2012 — Hunt Refining Co. It’s an important step for a startup seeking $1 billion in federal loan guarantees. Hunt has agreed to buy an unspecified amount of product. Read more »
Retroficiency, a startup out of MIT, says its software and deep data analysis can make the process of identifying which buildings in a portfolio of hundreds are ripe for efficiency retrofits, a lot easier and cheaper. On Wednesday, the Boston-based startup announced an $800,000 angel round. Read more »
When it comes to green stimulus, the world is halfway done — and China and Japan lead in the race, according to a Tuesday report. But the United States is catching up, though not without some hiccups along the way. Read more »
Backyard batteries could help stabilize neighborhood grids and give residents the juice to ride through blackouts and peak power spikes. But with batteries so expensive nowadays, how can utilities justify the expense? Read more »
Will demand response move to the cloud? Lockheed Martin is linking demand response with a cloud-based smart meter platform for cooperative utilities, and EnerNOC is turning to Salesforce.com for smart grid-customer interaction. Read more »
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has upheld EnerNOC’s view that it wasn’t breaking any market rules in delivering negawatts to Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM — good news for EnerNOC and other demand response aggregators. Read more »
Johnson Controls is buying up Campbell, Calif.-based EnergyConnect, one of the more interesting behind-the-scenes players in demand response software for the customer as well as the utility. Read more »
Stanford University spinout Amprius has landed $25 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Chinese firms IPV Capital and Qian Neng Fund, to bring its silicon nanowire lithium-ion battery anode technology to commercial production, most likely for consumer electronics batteries. Read more »
Does the future of energy-efficient, broadband-connected cities lie in the cloud? Cisco, IBM and Microsoft certainly seem to think so — and pilots they’re doing now could lead to the notion of green cloud cities of the future. Read more »
PowerIt Solutions, a behind-the-scenes player in building energy control and demand response technology player, has raised $5 million and landed a new CEO. New partners and new markets are on its menu. Read more »
Deregulated energy markets, with companies competing with one another for customers, could be great places to test how technologies and services engage customers. Whether that will lead to energy savings is less clear, however. Read more »
Honeywell and State Grid Corp. of China plan a big demand response pilot project using OpenADR, marking the first step into the potentially huge Chinese market for the emerging standard for automating demand response. Read more »
IBM has launched a new software platform to get utility smart meters to work better within and across the boundaries of their own networks. It’s another smart grid integration move in a quickly growing ecosystem. Read more »
Turning cities into networked hubs of efficiency: is the motivation behind Cisco’s connected city initiative. But the business models for how cities will make their connected worlds pay off financially isn’t quite clear. Cisco, for now wants to focus on building the infrastructure. Read more »
Thermoelectric startup Phononic Devices has landed a $10 million investment to work on its technology to convert heat into electricity, or vice versa. There’s a big market for thermoelectrics that are cheap and reliable enough. Read more »
EcoDog is trying to sneak its high-end energy management system into homes as part of a broader rooftop solar power system. Will the high-end buyers of rooftop solar help break open the market for energy-smart home devices? Read more »
There’s a divide within data centers today between the people who manage data center cooling, power and security systems and the folks that manage the IT side of data centers. But right now the efficiencies of IT have more to offer the future of greener data centers. Read more »
Cutting the battery cost out of owning an electric vehicle could be a key way to push electric vehicles into the mass market, according to a report from consulting giant Accenture. Read more »
U.S. demand response leader EnerNOC took time during its Wednesday year-end conference call to defend itself in a market rules dispute with big customer PJM, saying the grid operator wants to “underpay” EnerNOC for its negawatts. Read more »
A study has found that Southern utilities could be able to pay back the costs of smart meters a lot faster and more easily than East and West coast utilities. How do regional grid differences play out in real life? Read more »
The U.S. grid regulator (FERC) issued a report on the state of the U.S. smart meter and demand response markets, laying out a few tidbits for the industry to keep an eye on, like protecting consumer data privacy and using the Internet to connect variable pricing. Read more »
