Smart Grid — GigaOM

Smart Grid

Making the automation systems in commercial buildings smarter – that’s the idea behind startup Scientific Conservation, which today announced a new $15.65 million funding round led by DFJ Growth Fund Managing Director (and Internet exec entrepreneur) Barry Schuler. Read More »

GridPoint Raises Even More Money

GridPoint — the smart grid startup that’s raised lots of money and has a lot to prove — has now raised yet even more funding: a $23.6 million round according to a filing. That brings 8-year-old GridPoint’s total financing to over $240 million since its founding. Read More »

 
 

Over the past year China has emerged as one of the largest smart grid markets in the world and according to a report out this week will grow from $22.3 billion in 2011 to $61.4 billion in 2015. What’s a key way in? Partnerships. Read More »

According to a recently-released independent report from the California Council on Science and Technology, which compiled a lot of the already available research done on the subject, there are no known health risks associated with living with a smart meter. Read More »

The company behind the sometimes-annoying WeatherBug app has emerged with a new plan to build what it says will be the world’s largest global sensor network that will track green house gas emissions. AWS Convergence Technologies, now Earth Networks, will invest $25 million into the network. Read More »

Silver Spring & Control4 Team Up For Smart Homes

Silver Spring Networks, which builds smart grid networks for utilities, today announced a reseller partnership with Control4, a startup that provides home automation gear and services. This deal between the two leaders in these spaces shows how the smart home sector is maturing. Read More »

Intel Capital and Braemar Energy have invested an undisclosed amount of funding into Viridity Energy, a startup which makes software that dynamically manages power loads on the grid in terms of energy pricing, renewable energy generation and energy storage. Read More »

ABB Backs ECOtality as U.S. EV Charging Partner

Swiss grid giant ABB has put $10 million into car charging company ECOtality and linked a North American manufacturing agreement. Looks like ABB is picking its preferred winner for the U.S. car charging network to come. Read More »

Z-Wave Makes Headway in Home Energy, via Verizon

Did the proprietary wireless technology Z-Wave just do a leap frog move into the smart energy home over a more standards-based approach like ZigBee? Verizon confirmed with me late last week that its inaugural smart home energy pilot will initially be based around Z-Wave. Read More »

Last summer, GE and a group of VCs launched a $200 million fund for a smart grid challenge that plans to allocate financing to entrepreneurs and startups innovating around the power grid. This morning at CES, GE announced another phase: the eco-home. Read More »

For the first time, power company NRG Energy and its utility Reliant Energy are making a showing at the massive gadget love-fest CES. Why? As Reliant Energy President Jason Few told me, this is the beginning of the “digitization of the power grid.” Read More »

LG entered the smart appliance fray in a big way this week, unveiling its line of Thinq appliances meant to save energy and communicate with owners and utilities via wireless networks. Hopefully, the connected appliances won’t follow the path of LG’s discontinued DIOS Internet fridge. Read More »

More Must Reads

A year ago, I predicted that telcos and cable providers would start dabbling in energy management before the ball dropped into 2010. I was right. . . . though about a year too early. Now 2011 is the year this looks like its going to happen. Read More »

Some residents of the little town of Inverness in Northern California are trying to relive Berkeley in the ’60′s — but instead of sticking it to “the man,” they’re fighting an even greater evil: smart meters! Read More »

Verizon’s long-rumored push into the smart energy home is, finally, on its way. Well, a trial version is. The phone company said today that starting in January it will conduct a home monitoring and control pilot program in homes in New Jersey that will include energy … Read More »

2010 was a year of ups and downs for the smart grid industry. Here are my thoughts on what needs to happen — both across the industry and with some of the individual players — for this sector to hit a home run in 2011. Read More »

This year saw some improvements in public market investors’ appetite for cleantech companies, but not enough to make it a good year. As always, the hopes are that 2011 will prove a better one. Check out our picks of top 10 IPO candidates. Read More »

There’s cash in the smart grid for telcos — close to $5 billion by 2016, according to a report out this morning from Pike Research, and most of that revenue opportunity will go to wireless operators such as AT&T and Verizon. Read More »

How does one of the world’s biggest makers of technology to control buildings connect with the power grid? Honeywell is in a natural position to start answering that question with smart thermostats, home energy management, open source demand response, and a couple of quiet research projects. Read More »

Could proprietary Z-Wave be gaining ground on standards-based ZigBee in the home energy networking space? Here are a couple of recent developments that indicate Z-Wave could have a role to play. Read More »

The buying spree in the smart grid-smart building nexus keeps going, this time in France, where Schneider Electric has bought building energy management software providers Vizelia and D5X. Chalk it up to what’s set to be the biggest greentech acquisition trend of 2011. Read More »

There’s been so many acquisitions in the smart grid sector as of late, we’ve been updating the tally every couple of months. Since September there’s been at least six more, so we’re updating our list once again. Read More »

Itron announced this morning that it plans to buy up French smart grid energy management and analytics company Asais. The deal shows how Itron continues to move beyond providing endpoints and hardware to selling end-to-end solutions, software and services. Read More »

General Electric research shows that ZigBee uses less than half the power of Wi-Fi for home energy networking — a fact that cements its likely role as a key enabler of GE’s home energy management devices to come. Read More »

Few expect a newly Republican-tilted Congress to do much about clean energy or climate change, so states will be 2011′s greentech incubators. A new report puts California, Oregon and Massachusetts as the top greentech states. Read More »

NRG looks to be trying out a vertical green energy play from generation to consumer, combining its fossil-fuel-based electricity, its wind and solar power, and it’s green consumer strategy. Will it work? Read More »

The telco world is finally making some progress on the home automation and energy management front. On the heels of the news that Motorola will buy up smart home startup 4Home, CEPro is reporting that AT&T has acquired Xanboo, a home automation and energy player. Read More »

EnerNOC’s predilection for buying it’s way to expansion isn’t waning. This morning the leader in the demand response sector announced that it plans to buy Global Energy Partners, a company in Walnut Creek, Calif., that develops demand response and energy efficiency products for utilities. Read More »

Grid Net, the smart grid software maker, has officially moved beyond the wireless standard WiMAX and this morning announced that its software now supports the 4G wireless standard LTE (Long Term Evolution), the dominate next-gen wireless standard embraced by U.S. telcos. Read More »

Motorola has touted its plans for the so-called smart home for years, and now it’s planning to acquire its way in with a startup that highlights energy management: 4Home. Will more telcos and service providers get into smart energy, too? Read More »

Smart grid data analytics, or software and services that can mine power grid data, will grow from a $356 million market to $4.2 billion by 2015, Pike Research predicts. Read More »

General Electric has launched a new business around energy-smart household appliances and products. But utilities are its first target customers, not consumers. Read More »

China plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade on a nationwide smart grid, but where are the opportunities for outside investors and innovators? Read More »

Home energy efficiency startup OPOWER has raised $50 million as it seeks to quadruple its customer base and add new features to its age-old, paper report-based customer outreach. Read More »

Brazil hopes to install 62 million smart meters by 2020, and companies like Silver Spring Networks, Landis+Gyr and Echelon are targeting the market. Read More »

Buzzy Silicon Valley home energy management startup People Power has opened its arms to an enterprise platform approach, one that may involve targeting the office even more aggressively than the home. Read More »

Despite some setbacks, the U.S. smart meter push is continuing at a stimulus-fueled pace. Pike Research reported Monday that more than 90 U.S. utilities have 57.9 million smart meters planned and on the way.That’s 7.9 million more than eMeter counted up. Read More »

The Department of Energy quietly handed out about $19 million in grants this week for five interesting smart grid experiments, including underground wireless communications and energy storage circuits. Read More »

NRG Energy is launching what it calls the first privately funded plug-in electric vehicle charging network in the U.S. in the country’s oil capital of Houston. Read More »

Smart appliances are still years away from mass adoption, but they’re going to have a bigger influence on how the smart grid and the energy-smart home get connected, according to Pike Research. Read More »

Trilliant has hopped the pond in a big way. The smart grid networking provider announced late Wednesday that British Gas has picked it for its smart meter deployment, starting with 1 million meters to be deployed by 2012. Read More »

The demand response players continue rebranding. EnerNOC has launched its EfficiencySMART brand to tie together its building energy management, sustainability planning and energy procurement lines of business from building to enterprise. Read More »

Smart energy gear — from smart meters to intelligent plugs to routers that can connect with smart meters — represents the largest growth opportunity for chips and modules that use the wireless standard ZigBee (or in geek terms 802.15.4). Read More »

General Electric and some high-flying venture capital partners have named 12 winners of the first $55 million of a $200 million “ecomagination challenge” they launched this summer. The list is full of some already well-funded companies, including several that GE is already investing in. Read More »

Electronics giant Belkin and stealthy startup PowerMap are taking separate cracks at a holy grail of sorts for home energy management: a device that can read every power load in the house from a single outlet. Read More »

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