Since then, more utilities are paying attention and starting to look for ways to protect their data and transmission and distribution networks, said Doug Westlund, CEO of N-Dimension Solutions, a Canadian cybersecurity company, during an interview this week. N-Dimension announced earlier this week it had raised an A round of $3.85 million, led by EnerTech Capital.

“I’m seeing utilities, including some municipal and public power utilities and co-op utilities, that are taking this seriously,” Westlund said.

Efforts by government, security companies and the Electric Power Research Institute, an R&D organization for the U.S. utility industry, have raised awareness among electric whole sellers and retailers. More importantly, regulatory mandates on cybersecurity, enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, are forcing utilities to act.

The emergence of the smart grid, which uses a lot more digital and standard-based communication technologies that automate data collection, is one of the reasons why preventing cyber attacks has become an important task. Threats aren’t always coming from the outside. Sometimes, the problems are internal, such as when utility employees inadvertently use infected USB drives to download data. A report by the U.S. Department of Energy last September outlined key challenges and solutions for building a strong defense for a smart grid.

N-Dimension and its investors are banking on this trend. The company, founded in 2002, had been self-funded. With the new funding, it wants to expand its reach internationally and also line up customers in industries such as transportation and oil and gas.

The company develops software and creates deployment plans for tightening the security of a utility’s operation, from the control center to the smart meters. N-Dimension uses servers and other equipment from suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories and add layers of its own software, Westlund said. N-Dimension’s software will block access by unauthorized people and other malware intrusion, and issue alerts and reports.

The company makes money by licensing its software, selling equipment and providing maintenance services. N-Dimension’s customers also can contract the company to run their security systems.

Companies that have bought equipment with N-Dimension’s security software include Alabama Municipal Electric Authority and Jo-Carroll Energy. Those are the ones that have showed up in press releases. Westlund declined to disclose the names of other customers.

Image courtesy of stebulus via Flickr

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The sector is emerging, and grew just 8 percent over the first half of 2012, says Pike. While there are now 649 energy storage projects that have been announced, of those, there are only 514 projects deployed.

So what’s the hold up? Energy storage has long been considered the key to adding more clean power onto the grid. Because solar and wind only generate power when the sun shines or the wind blows (called variable energy) they need to be connected to energy storage projects to level out that generation. Storage projects can bank, say, the extra power from a wind turbine on a windy day, and then release that energy when the wind stops blowing. Power companies can also use energy storage projects to better manage the grid for a variety of applications.

According to Pike, here’s three reasons for the slow moving sector:

1). The technology is still too expensive: The costs vary a lot between different types of energy storage technologies. Pumped hydro is one of the cheapest forms, as is compressed air energy storage, but lithium ion batteries are far more expensive. A report from EPRI last year found that if energy storage prices dropped to $500 per kilowatt hour that could boost the market.

2). The market is overstated: There are more projects that have been announced — and are even inactive — than are deployed. Some of these announced projects might not ever get built. Inflating the market isn’t good because it creates hype around a sector that still has substantial hurdles.

3). Advanced energy storage tech is dependent on government support: Many of these projects have relied upon government support in terms of grants. The flow battery project in Modesto that I detailed this week is being built with a Department of Energy grant.

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If you are like me, then you are constantly using your iPad all the time. I like to run my iPad at full brightness and I am almost always connected to the Internet. And that means frequent visits to the electrical outlet — at least twice a day. And as result I often fret about how much energy I am using on my iPad and other devices, and how they are impacting my carbon footprint.

Some new research from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) breaks down how much an iPad costs in terms of electricity and how much energy all the world’s iPads consume. EPRI calculations show that the annual cost of charging an iPad every other day is about $1.36 a year.

The analysis shows that each model of the iPad consumes less than 12 kWh of elelctricity over the course of a year, based on a full charge every other day. By comparison, a plasma 42” television consumes 358 kWh of electricity a year. EPRI conducted the analysis in Knoxville, Tenn., at its power utilization laboratory. Costs may vary depending on what region that a consumer resides and the price of electricity in a particular location. The assessment was conducted to determine the load requirements – the amount of power needed to operate the devices — of the increasingly popular iPad.

But when you  multiply those kilowatts by millions of iPads being sold, the energy impact on the planet starts to add up pretty quickly. According to EPRI calculations:

… the average energy used by all iPads in the market is approximately 590 gigawatt hours (GWh). In a scenario where the number of iPads tripled over the next two years, the energy required would be nearly equivalent to two 250-megawatt (MW) power plants operating at a 50 percent utilization rate. A quadrupling of sales in two years would require energy generated by three 250-MW power plants

Our measurements indicate that new iPads will consume about 65 percent more electricity per year. Other products that were included in the analysis were laptop PCs, which consume 72.3 kWh of electricity each year and cost consumers $8.31 and 60W CFL light bulbs which consume approximately 14 kWh of electricity and cost consumers $1.61 a year.

They also calculate that the Apple iPhone 3G consumes 2.2 kWh of electricity each year, which results in a power cost of $0.25 annually.

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Four-year-old Aquion has developed a modular battery that uses basic, widely-available (and edible) materials, like sodium and water. The company says its bulk battery will be low cost compared to the current batteries that are being piloted on the power grid, and could be as cheap as one-tenth the cost of the alternatives. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) says that grid-scale lead acid batteries cost around $950-$1,590 per kilowatt, or $2,770-$3,800 per kilowatt-hour, and lithium-ion batteries cost about $1,085-$1,550 per kilowatt, or $4,340-$6,200 per kilowatt-hour.

Aquion’s goal is to use its grid battery to help utilities integrate more solar and wind power. Solar and wind are variable power sources (when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow they don’t produce power) and energy storage will be a crucial way to even out those ups and downs for the grid. Aquion also says its battery, which it thinks can last 20-30 years, can withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity, meaning installing it onsite at a solar farm wouldn’t affect the battery’s performance.

Founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre developed the basic science for Aquion at Carnegie Mellon University. The battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode. Water-based electrolytes shuttle ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging. Traditional batteries often use solvent-based electrolytes.

The idea was to create a battery out of the most basic elements that could produced at a massive scale for cheap. Aquion Energy business development chief Ted Wiley, described the battery to us as “literally edible—every single material in the battery.”

The company is now looking to transition from “an early-stage technology development organization into a full-fledged product company,” as Kleiner chairman Ray Lane described it earlier this year. Commercializing the tech will be tough. For example, just selling into a utility-scale energy project can take as long as three years, and the factory will cost an estimated $75 million to $80 million.

Image courtesy of Suicine, and Aquion Energy

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To shed some light on this problem, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released a report on Tuesday that pinpoints the likely impact that electric vehicles will have on the electric grid and what steps utilities can take to deal with the impact. The report looks at the affect of plug-in electric cars, whether they are the all-electric variety such as the Nissan Leaf or the hybrid version like the Chevy Volt. And speaking of the Volt, GM plans to launch what it’s calling the first real-world pilot of smart-grid solutions for electric vehicles this year.

Here are some key findings from the EPRI report:

1. How many electric vehicles will be on the roads, in what time frame? The electric car market has barely started, and key technology, including next-gen batteries, that can deliver the wide adoption of electric vehicles have yet to be developed. EPRI came up with three forecasts for the cumulative number of electric cars that will show up between 2010 and 2030. The low estimates are 3.1 million by 2020 and 15 million by 2030, based on historical sales from 2000 to 2008. The medium estimates are 5.8 million by 2020 and 35 million by 2030, based on historical sales and carmakers’ announcements of new models and production volumes. The high side will be 12 million by 2020 and over 65 million by 2030. And, yes, that’s a large range for an estimate.

2. Electric vehicles’ share of the car market. The low estimates put electric cars at 1 percent of the total cars driven in the U.S. by 2010 and 4 percent by 2030. The medium estimates peg the market penetration at 1.9 percent in 2020 and 9.4 percent in 2030. In the most optimistic scenario, electric cars will make up 3.9 percent in 2020 and roughly 17.7 percent in 2030.

3. How cheap is the fuel for electric cars? Electric cars can be fueled up at one-third or a quarter of the cost of a gasoline car, given the current pricing of both fuel types. Utilities are worried that because electricity is cheaper to start with, drivers might juice up their cars even in peak hours, when electric rates are high (but not as high as comparable gasoline costs). But providing and educating drivers about the low rates they could get in off-peak hours will help to minimize the need to increase electricity supply during peak hours and alleviate any stress to the grid.

4. Charging at home is ideal. Although residential charging equipment will typically require 1.4 kW to 7.7 kW of power, peak electricity demand from electric cars will be far lower, at 700 watts. That’s because there is enough time from early evening to the next morning to accommodate charging. By providing incentives, such as low electric rates, utilities can nudge car owners to start charging after 9 p.m., when overall demand for electricity is much lower than earlier in the evening. The hours between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. are most ideal and cause the least impact to the grid. But the report cautions that if most people program their cars to start charging, say, right after 9 p.m., then the utilities will have to deal with a big spike in demand.

5. Equipment cost. A residential charging unit typically costs roughly $1,500 to install. Charging-station costs vary from $2,500 to $6,000, depending on the features of the equipment. Prices should fall as more equipment is installed.

6. Potential rate plans. To entice consumers to charge late at night, utilities could try several offers that are similar to cell phone plans. They can charge a fixed rate for an “anytime plan,” a discount rate between certain hours overnight or a flat monthly fee for charging overnight. The last option could provide consumers with the most savings.

7. Utilities with the most initiatives. Five utilities already have done a lot of homework in figuring out current and potential future charging infrastructure costs in their service territories: Southern California Edison, Detroit Edison, Progress Energy, Georgia Power and Sacramento Municipal Utilities District.

8. Who will own the charging stations? Who will own and provide charging services outside the home will be a more complex question than in the case of gasoline stations. And the costs of these services to consumers can range from free to rates that provide a good profit for the equipment owners. Here are five major ownership types: government, utility, employers, retailers and strictly for-profit charging stations. Some of them might offer electricity at a discount to attract customers.

Photo courtesy of Einstraus via Flickr

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So it would be nice if solar panels — or more specifically, the inverters that turn their direct current into grid-ready AC — could talk to the smart grid, to let utilities know what’s going on. This week, the utility industry released a common standard for doing just that. The next step will be for solar inverter makers and smart grid vendors to make equipment and software that speaks the language, and start testing it out. (To learn more about the intersection of smart grid and solar come to Green:Net on April 21 in San Francisco, where we’ll feature a discussion between NRG Energy CEO David Crane and Silver Spring Networks EVP & CMO Eric Dresselhuys. Get tickets here.)

The new standard from the Distributed Network Protocol (DNP) Users Group is the result of nearly two years of effort by the industry, aimed at capturing some of the extra benefits that come from solar panels and inverters. Besides delivering power, inverters can manage voltage and reactive power fluctuations, and can push power to storage systems to cover the the passing of clouds over panels — or save up to feed back into the grid when it’s facing peak demand.

Indeed, projects that integrate these kinds of functions are underway around the world. Echelon is working with big inverter maker SMA Solar Technology and Fat Spaniel was bought by inverter maker Power-One. Enphase uses its own technology for its microinverters, as does Petra Solar with its pole-mounted, solar panel-connected microinverter arrays. Big players like General Electric, Siemens and Schneider Electric are also getting involved.

But without a standard to build to, they’ve all progressed along unique, mostly proprietary lines, said Brian Seal, analyst with the Electric Power Research Institute. In practice, that means a lot of the cool things inverters could do for the grid were left untouched, just because they were too hard for utilities to operate, he said. It took two years, but the industry has finally come up with a common language to get around that problem via DNP3, one of North America’s most common grid control standards, he said.

“This release is significant, because we now have a standard document that allows manufacturers to pick it up and actually build to it,” Seal said. While he didn’t name any companies that have announced technology around the new standard, he did note that the working group that came up with it had 450 individual participants, including every inverter maker he knows of. EPRI coordinated the effort with the Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories and the Solar Electric Power Association. For more information, read my GigaOm Pro report,  EPRI’s Solar Power Phrasebook — a Guide to Future Communications (subscription required).

What’s next? Eventually, a world in which every inverter and smart grid device can plug into a standards-based system and open up the innate abilities — absorbing and releasing power to keep the grid in balance — to manipulation and control by any number of software platforms, Seal said. Of course, there’s a long way to go before that happens, and interoperability testing and field trials are next on the agenda.

What are the benefits? First and foremost: enable solar to continue to grow. While it’s hard to predict just how much local solar power it takes to destabilize the grid, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that the 20 percent wind power levels seen in the Pacific Northwest present problems with stability. Local neighborhoods aren’t likely to be able to take much more than that either.

Instability can even force utilities to stop new solar arrays from being built, or force them to hook up smart grid functions to do it. In Germany, where generous government subsidies have led to the world’s most solar panel-saturated neighborhoods, new medium-voltage grid codes require all solar inverters to provide a long list of advanced grid support features such as reactive power and VAR support, Seal noted.

While DNP3 is the main technology used for grid field equipment for the U.S. and Australia, Europe relies on a set of standards known as IEC 61850, and the two are working together, he said. Standards geeks will also be interested to hear that the IEEE 1547.8 group, which deals with distributed energy resources-to-grid integration, is also getting involved.

Image courtesy of CERTs via Creative Commons license.

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Last year, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) hooked up with the Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Solar Electric Power Association to define how inverters could help utilities manage grid stability. Most inverters are capable of communications via proprietary technologies, but without standards to link diverse systems, utilities won’t be able to tie them together in any meaningful way.

On one hand, solar monitoring technology and services from companies such as SunEdison, Fat Spaniel and Echelon can track basic status reporting and manage and calculate data on power produced and how much power earns. But these systems can’t generally perform more complex control tasks, EPRI analyst Brian Seal said.

Echelon is working with big inverter maker SMA Solar Technology and Fat Spaniel was bought by inverter maker Power-One earlier this month. Some inverter manufacturers have been working on a Modbus specification called SunSpec that could bring monitoring, at least, into a common framework, Seal noted. And big players like General Electric, Siemens and Schneider Electric have experience in power generation controls that will likely play into the effort.

EPRI and partners have asked two key standards groups — DNP3 for utility-scale systems, and the ZigBee Alliance’s Smart Energy Profile 2.0 for homes, businesses and other end users — to convert this preliminary work into a set of real-world standards, EPRI’s  Seal says. There’s a long way to go, but since EPRI tends to ask questions that utilities want answered, there’s little doubt that the solar inverter makers, and the industry in general, are paying attention.

To learn more, check out my GigaOm Pro update, and stay tuned for next steps from EPRI, including work on how to start testing gear built to emerging standards.

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In my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), I lay out recent interviews with both the ZigBee Alliance and the Wi-Fi Alliance to demonstrate where the two differ and where they work well together, as well as with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on its research into both. Here are some conclusions:

Market penetration: Most smart meters that are being deployed in North America have ZigBee radios to communicate with home energy devices. Wi-Fi’s penetration has been limited to wireless thermostats and other devices — though the ubiquity of Wi-Fi in the home could push more energy-aware devices to support it.

Cost: ZigBee was built with low-power sensors and controls in mind, and has much lower processing, memory and power requirements than Wi-Fi as a result. The Wi-Fi Alliance counters that its members are hard at work on lower-power chipsets that could compete with ZigBee’s advantages there.

Robustness: ZigBee device makers have overcome early problems with smart meter-home device connectivity by boosting power from 10 milliwattsvolts to 100 milliwattsvolts, the maximum allowed for the unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum in which it operates. Still, as Craig Rodine, EPRI technical executive, told me, ZigBee will have to compete against other technologies in that spectrum, including the latest iteration of Wi-Fi known as 802.11n. EPRI has analyzed tested the technology, which is capable of streaming video and longer-range applications, and “it tends to win in a foot race” against ZigBee, he said.

Interference: Last year, EPRI did a test of ZigBee communications in a single-story ranch home in Pleasanton, Calif., and found that the network had trouble reaching certain areas, a problem caused both by physical obstacles like the chimney and electromagnetic interference from devices like microwave ovens.  The ZigBee Alliance says that its technology has built-in frequency agility and inter-packet spacing to allow it to work amidst interference. It’s also a mesh networking technology, meaning that every in-home device can also help propagate the network around obstacles.

Interoperability and ubiquity: The first version of ZigBee’s energy-specific technology, Smart Energy Profile 1.0, had some problems with ZigBee Alliance-certified devices failing to interoperate, EPRI’s Rodine noted. The new Smart Energy Profile 2.0 is meant to solve that problem, and Rodine suggests that ZigBee’s work with the Wi-Fi Alliance — including the creation of an Internet protocol (IP) stack for SEP 2.0 — is part of that effort. After all, the Wi-Fi Alliance has one of the most trusted certification regimes in the world, with tens of thousands of certified devices that have proven interoperability.

Of course, neither ZigBee nor Wi-Fi backers claim that they’ve got the end-all, be-all technology for networking energy-smart homes. Combinations that use Wi-Fi as a backbone and ZigBee as a link to multiple end-points are likely to see greater adoption as both teams work to integrate their technologies. To read the rest of my post check out GigaOM Pro.

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The electric grid is not antiquated but it needs connectivity:  There is a rumor that the electric grid is antiquated that is “spreading from Silicon Valley” by people who don’t really understand the industry. The grid is made up of many intelligent devices that are widely dispersed. The challenge, generally speaking, is not to improve the devices that are already deployed but to cost-effectively network them together.

Don’t put too much smarts into the meter: If you do, five years down the line you’ll regret it as technology advances. Then your meter will be obsolete. Instead, the intelligence around services like home area networks should be “in a box” that you place in the home and that can easily be swapped like a home computer as technology advances. In a related comment, Ibrahim said meters aren’t the only route for the smart grid to extend into the home. Other options could evolve, though he didn’t offer any examples.

Grid security requires comprehensive security, not just a big wall: Utilities can’t just build a big wall and expect to keep everyone out. A comprehensive approach to security will include technological advancement but also personnel training, process control and open digital security standards.

Go slow with the adoption of interoperability standards: Smart grid communication standards should be based on best practices. So the industry should develop the science first and then put the standard in place, not the other way around (Pacific Gas & Electric’s Kevin Dasso, while speaking on the same panel, appeared to disagree, however, when he said that you can either let the standards control you or you can work to control the standards) . Ibrahim also said the smart grid industry shouldn’t think it can take Internet Protocol and quickly shift it over to the electric grid. There are several reasons, one of them being that the electric grid must be more secure than IP currently enables.

Home energy management systems need to impress the neighbors: Many Americans won’t pay a dollar for a soda out of a machine, but put them at a bar next to someone they want to impress and they’ll easily spend three. So home energy management solutions that just show you how much energy you use and when won’t get much market penetration. The solution has to have some bells and whistles that will allow customers to impress their neighbors, say by linking it in some way with the family flat screen TV or by controlling appliances automatically. In a related comment, Ibrahim said he expects the private sector demand-response players, such as EnerNOC or Tendril, to increasingly offer customer-centric solutions for lowering their power usage. These solutions may be tied to home energy management systems.

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The idea of this “car-to-smart meter connectivity,” as Ford calls it, is to let vehicle owners program charging based on time and electricity rate preferences. Utilities like the idea of having plug-in vehicles programmed to charge at night. Demand is lower, and utilities can often tap into more wind energy than during the day, said Mark Duvall, Director of the Electric Power Research Institute’s (EPRI) Electric Transportation team today at the Ford event.

EPRI is partnering with Ford, as well as the Department of Energy on the vehicle-to-grid trial, which is set to include 21 plug-in hybrid Ford Escape demo vehicles and run for three years. Several plug-in models are in the pipeline to come out before the demo is completed, including an all-electric commercial van called the Transit Connect next year, the Focus compact electric car in 2011 (pictured in the gallery, below) and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in 2012.

Duvall said EPRI favors all types of electrification, including all-electric or battery electric vehicles (BEV), plug-in hybrids and hybrid electric vehicles. But he championed plug-in hybrids as the most flexible. “It stores its own power on board, and if you jump up in the middle of the night and need to go to Vegas,” he said, you can, since you can fill up at today’s gas stations.

In general, he added, plug-in hybrids also use about the same amount of electricity as all-electric vehicles, since a car like Ford’s plug-in hybrid Fusion “is on a mission to drain that battery.” The challenge comes from higher-power charging for all-electric cars, which can stress the distribution system.

Adding intelligence and opening communication between vehicles and the grid can only go so far. “Even the smartest charging system can have issues.” said Duvall. As more and more vehicles get plugged into the grid, some equipment will simply wear out faster. Investing in infrastructure upgrades “so it can support ever more plug-in vehicles is really an easy thing to do” for utilities, said Duvall, if, in response to reduced emissions and reliance on oil imports, “people perceive it as a social good.”

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