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Cleantech

China likes to do things on a grand scale, which allows it serve its vast population spreading out in huge regions and brag about its technical advancements. Here comes another one: the country is now building a transmission line with a whopping 800-kilovolt of capacity that … Read More »

Siemens, ABB make major grid gear plays

Not all the opportunities in the smart grid are about big data and analytics. Power gear giants Siemens and ABB unveiled separately that they plan to make large grid gear acquisitions. Siemens will buy RuggedCom, and ABB will buy Thomas & Betts Corp. Read More »

 
 

After a variety of strategies and around $100 million in funding, startup Tendril is now largely a software company, and on Tuesday at the DistribuTECH conference in San Antonio, Tendril announced a big partner in its play to provide the software layer for electric vehicles: BMW. … Read More »

2012: Questions on the road ahead to the smart grid

Last week eMeter’s Chris King shared his smart grid predictions for 2012. But also, as the new year turns, he says he’s pondering these important questions, too: Read More »

Meter giant Landis+Gyr has snapped up smart meter data management company Ecologic Analytics, the companies announced on Tuesday. Ecologic Analytics has been around for over a decade, and Landis + Gyr was already a minority shareholder in the firm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Read More »

One of the key ways that eMeter has developed over the past 20 months since its current CEO Gary Bloom came on board has been to act like an enterprise software company, according to an indepth interview with Bloom in Xconomy. It’s a solid tip. Read More »

For the occasion of Siemens’ swallowing eMeter, we have pulled together our recurring smart grid acquisitions list, including the new ones we have seen in recent months. Read More »

Greentech struggles are business as usual for the Valley

Do recent struggles dominating the news represent the beginning of the end for green technology? Nah, it looks like business as usual for Silicon Valley. Only one in ten start-ups ever make it, VCs like to say, and failure makes you stronger. Read More »

Power and engineering giant Siemens will buy smart meter software company eMeter, the companies announced on Monday. While the companies did not disclose the price, this is one of the most high-profile deals for the smart grid in 2011. Read More »

Now for Today in Green IT, news, notes and musing from our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Nuclear power is falling in Germany and Japan, as corporations follow suit from country-wide protests and anti-nuclear politics. Read More »

The U.S. military has stepped up efforts to invest and use more cleantech at its bases and battlefields, including renewable electricity, energy storage and a host of energy efficiency technologies. Here is a list of plans and projects underway. Read More »

U.S. startup Nuvve is setting its sights on the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) market with a 30-car project in Denmark that it says will sell plug-in car battery power to help stabilize the grid. Can the model scale? Read More »

More Must Reads

Power gear giant Siemens has bought a stake in startup Semprius that makes solar concentrating photovoltaic tech, which use mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight onto highly efficient solar cells. Solar concentrating PV is a sort of hybrid between solar panels and solar thermal tech. Read More »

Power gear giant Siemens announced on Monday that it has invested in, and will also market technologies from, home energy startup Tendril. Tendril sells software and devices that monitor and manage the home energy consumption of consumers. Read More »

Power gear giants continue their smart grid shopping spree. Schneider Electric is bidding to buy software maker Telvent for about $2 billion. The acquisition would give Schneider, which is a massive power equipment maker, more software and IT capabilities for the power grid. Read More »

The Utilities Telecom Council trade group says plug-in cars will need 16 times the power they now need in the next decade. Utilities are under the gun to handle car charging as quickly as possible. Read More »

One of the early problems with the cleantech sector was that many of the big public companies that offered exits for innovative cleantech startups hadn’t yet matured into aggressive acquirers. But I think the power gear firms have finally woken up to purchasing innovation. Read More »

Enphase Energy has made a name for itself as a trailblazer of the microinverter market. But keeping that lead won’t be easy, and the company is launching a series of new products that are smaller and lighter and more tailored for different customer types. Read More »

Offshore wind power will get a $50.5 million research boost and dedicated “Wind Energy Area” in the mid-Atlantic region under a new federal plan. Google and co-investors in a $5 billion offshore wind transmission project will be pleased. 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 »

Lockheed Martin has turned to the smart grid with a vengeance. The gigantic defense contractor has been helping utilities design, manage and secure smart meter networks, distribution grid sensor systems and microgrids for years, but in the past year has ramped up its efforts. Read More »

Smart grid trade show GridWeek is wrapping up in Washington D.C., but the hard work of integrating all the hardware and software on display has just begun. Read More »

BrightSource Energy and French power giant Alstom have formed a partnership aimed at building solar-thermal power plants in a ring around the Mediterranean. In terms of geography, if not scale, the plan echoes the scheme of the Desertec Initiative, the mega-giant of solar-thermal projects. Read More »

Schneider Electric likes to say that 70 percent of the world’s electrons flow through its equipment. What’s it doing to make those electrons flow more intelligently? Read More »

Big buildings already have plenty of energy management technology, and household energy efficiency is the focus of dozens of VC-backed startups and IT giants alike. But who’s tackling the small and mid-size commercial building market, or the “mushy middle?” Read More »

IBM has been talking for a long time about linking smart building technology and enterprise-wide sustainability. Late Thursday, it unleashed a slew of new products, services and partnerships aimed at cementing that role. Read More »

Smart meters get all the attention, but smart distribution grid and substation projects are actually taking the lead in smart grid spending across the nation, and corporate giants are reaping the benefit. That’s the gist of a Cleantech Group report released by the DOE Thursday. Read More »

Echelon has launched a new software-hardware combo to control the distribution portion of the grid. The product has two notable aspects: it’s open to third-party developers, and its first customer will be utility Duke Energy. Read More »

Mike Zimmerman, the CEO of building automation software startup BuildingIQ, says his company has for the first time met a utility’s demand to turn down power to manage peak load, automatically with a building control system in Perth, Australia. Read More »

Add electric vehicle smart charging to the long list of products that German energy and engineering giant Siemens wants to tackle for the smart grid. Siemens says it will partner with startup Coulomb Technologies and jointly sell Siemen’s smart grid IT products with Coulomb’s EV charging … Read More »

With ABB’s billion-dollar-acquisition of smart grid software maker Ventyx this week, it got us thinking about how hawt the smart grid M&A market has been. Here’s a tally of what’s (publicly) gone down over the past couple of years. Read More »

Swiss electrical equipment giant ABB has jumped feet first into the smart grid with the plan to purchase software maker Ventyx (from Vista Equity Partners) for over $1 billion, the companies announced this morning. Ventyx makes software for energy analytics, operations, and forecasting, among other applications. Read More »

Warner Philips, the co-founder of Lemnis Lighting and great grandson of the founder of Philips electronics, says his company will launch a full suite of LED products at a Las Vegas lighting convention next month, and eventually “An IPO is one of the opportunities for … Read More »

In the world of smart grid, there tends to be two kinds of networks — short range local area networks (LANs) that connect neighborhoods of smart meters together, and bigger-pipe “backhaul” wide-area networks (WANs) to carry that collected data back to the utility. But wait — there’s … Read More »

EnerNOC is a big name in the world of demand response — that is, turning down buildings’ energy use to help utilities shave peak power demands. But it’s also been making its way — and buying its way — into energy efficiency, carbon management … Read More »

Echelon makes smart meter networks and building automation systems. Could it bring the two businesses together? On Wednesday, Echelon shipped its 2 millionth smart meter, adding recent contracts with a host of Danish utilities and partners to its big list of European clients — and, … Read More »

When Forbes reported in November that IBM was launching a major utility and energy research lab in China and planned up to nine big smart grid projects in the country, it came as little surprise to many. After all, China is going to be spending … Read More »

Metrus Energy, a startup seeking to popularize a power purchase agreement-like model for investing in building energy efficiency projects, has landed its first contract. The “efficiency services agreement” announced Friday calls for military contractor BAE Systems to upgrade its Merrimack, N.H. manufacturing facility’s … Read More »

Military bases have been some of the pioneers for so-called microgrids — systems of self-generated electricity and intelligent controls that can be disconnected from the grid at large to keep the lights on when the utility can’t provide power. The idea is that a tree falling … Read More »

Microgrids — office parks, college campuses or communities that can generate their own power and disconnect and reconnect from the grid at large at a moment’s notice — could be integral building blocks of the smart grid. That’s why Dave Pacyna, senior vice president of … Read More »

Two of the biggest players in the emerging smart building industry have joined forces. IBM and Johnson Controls announced Monday the launch of a joint initiative called Smart Building Solution — combining the business analytics and enterprise software of Big Blue with the building … Read More »

The term “microgrid” may conjure up images of self-sufficient military bases and remote outposts, generating and consuming power without any connections to the larger electricity grid. After all, backup generators that support multiple buildings — the bare-bones definition of a microgrid —  are already a … Read More »

Just over six months have passed since Samsung unveiled a multibillion-dollar push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its factories and slash the amount of emissions resulting from its consumer products. Now the company is diversifying its efforts. Read More »

Hit the ground running in 2010. That appears to be the game plan for Semprius, a semiconductor technology company that is developing solar concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), systems that use mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight onto highly efficient solar cells. Just a month into the new … Read More »

Siemens, the German energy and engineering giant, has been slower to move into the smart grid than fellow competitors like GE and Swiss-based ABB. But over the past year Siemens has seemed to be making up for lost time, announcing a flurry of new projects … Read More »

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