GELI, or Growing Energy Labs Inc, has developed an operating system and set of software that can connect batteries for use on the power grid. Companies, building owners and utilities can buy the software and GELI-enabled batteries and use the batteries for services like providing energy storage for solar systems, or for things like storing and discharging energy when the demand for energy becomes out of balance with supply.

It’s still early days for smart grid battery services like this. Right now the grid has very little energy storage and power plants are basically producing the exact amount of energy that buildings and systems are consuming in real time. That makes the grid inefficient and costly. In the future when more clean power like solar and wind, as well as more electric vehicles, are added to the grid, more energy storage will be needed.

NIST has bought six “EOS Nodes,” which are computers with GELI’s operating system. NIST is going to connect the nodes to power converters and various battery systems and evaluate them for use in their Net Zero Home Project. For about a year now, NIST has been researching technologies that can make a home “net zero” or be able to produce and store as much energy as it consumes.

In GELI’s small lab and office space in the South of Market area of San Francisco, founder and CEO Ryan Wartena, and his team, have spent the last two years building large smart batteries that they call Energy Computers. While GELI is now focused on selling software, the company has ambitions to use its technology to usher in a vision of a smart “Internet of Energy” style power grid that has distributed, smart batteries running on their algorithms.

Home and building batteries are not as crazy as they might sound. Solar City recently unveiled in its IPO filing that it has 100 energy storage pilot projects, using batteries, under contract. In Japan, the market is just starting to emerge for batteries paired with home solar systems. At the smart grid conference Distributech early this year Panasonic was showing off a battery box that strings together hundreds of small format lithium-ion laptop batteries.

GELI recently went through the Greenstart program — a green digital accelerator in San Francisco — and raised a seed round through that program. Wartena told me earlier this year that GELI was looking to raise more money to kick off the business and start selling. GELI is an example of a so-called Clean Web company that uses information technology for cleantech aims. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that a quarter of the investments that went into cleantech in 2011 went into Clean Web companies, compared to 15 percent in 2009.

In the same way that computers and the Internet have been shaped by storage, a connected energy system will need to rely on storage, too. The energy grid is currently a centralized system, where energy is created and distributed from a centralized location by utilities. But eventually energy could form into a decentralized network with solar rooftops and microgrids, not unlike the architecture of the Internet. GELI wants to provide the OS for that energy Internet.

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The goal, according to the workshop’s website, is to explore:

• State-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share big data that could benefit from standardization
• Potential measurements to ensure the accuracy and robustness of methods that harness these technologies

The agenda for the event, hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Library, includes sessions on healthcare analytics and big data programs. Speakers on the latter session will include folks from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Experts from industry powers Google, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft — all of which have launched massive efforts in this area — will speak on big data platforms.

The federal government has been thinking — and talking about — big data a lot of late. In late March, the Obama administration hosted a webcast outlining its “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” that allocated more than $200 million annually in research grants and other investments to promote the use of big data to solve problems. That’s a pretty big number in a time of stressed and stretched federal budgets so the administration is betting that big data techniques can pay off in increased productivity and cost savings over the long run.

For more on the event, to be held in Gaithersburg, M.D. June 13-14, check out the Computing Community Consortium’s blog.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Krejci

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It’s not a passing fad. In fact, the four original markets –- Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C. –- continue to grow revenue at a 23 percent rate. And who cares about slightly more modest top line growth if there’s a path to profitability coupled with subscriber growth that is 25 percent year over year. If Zipcar can keep this up, I think the company should be considered as a model for success in the share economy.

Here’s other stories Adam has been reading about today:

• US wind turbine prices fallen by a third since 2008: The report out from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looks at not just the cost declines since 2008 but also why costs increased between 2002 and 2008, as well as the issues surrounding the U.S. dollar’s weakness and its impact on pricing.
• Membership opens for EV car sharing in San Diego: Daimler backed Car2Go has launched their fleet of all electric two seaters in San Diego. It’s the first fleet of all electric EVs for car sharing in North America. Interestingly, drivers can drop the car anywhere in the approved zone and Car2Go ensures that cars get to a charging station when necessary.
• NIST: We’re from the government and we’re here to help: GigaOM’s Barb Darrow takes a look at the new technology roadmap from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that should speed the government move to the cloud. Plagued by concerns about security and accountability, the government has been slow to adopt the cloud but the new guidelines should help somewhat.

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In the specific case of Shady RAT, spear fishing emails were sent to the target containing links to a web page that, when clicked on, automatically loaded a malicious remote access tool (RAT) program on the computer, thus gaining access to the network and the high-value information.

The new security threats

In the “old” days, it was fairly straightforward to imagine boundaries around your business data. Today, it’s fair to say, with the rapid adoption of cloud and mobile computing and the overall consumerization of IT, traditional boundaries have become fluid and, in most cases, nonexistent. In today’s world, hackers have figured out how to target the data when it is most exposed, whether it’s on a corporate server, an iPhone or in the cloud.

In this new IT world without boundaries, the traditional “layered” approach to enterprise data security becomes ineffective. Instead of assuming that data perimeter protection (protecting the networks and data “containers”) will keep data safe, we need to assume the bad guys are smart enough to not care about the containers and to instead attack the data. As the continued severity of data breaches show, bad guys are interested in the data itself, whenever it might be, and whenever they decide the time is right to strike.

What do we do in this new world? How do we protect data so that it is locked down and unusable by the bad guys while it is still accessible to those who need to use it for business purposes? While we can’t ignore the old approaches and steps for data protection, such as protecting IT infrastructure and putting in place effective monitoring approaches, we need a new step. Encryption, and not the traditional public key encryption, is the only way to keep sensitive data protected while at the same time keeping it usable.

Secure the data, not the perimeter

Protecting private and sensitive data in a cloud/mobile world is difficult, expensive and increasingly mandatory to comply with federal and state regulations as well as to protect brand and business reputations. Thus, we need to think about data protection from a data-centric point of view, where the data itself is protected. When you start thinking about how to protect your data in a world without boundaries, think about these four things:

• Monitoring matters. Monitoring is an essential component of your overall security; network monitoring and database monitoring solutions help identify the kinds of attacks that are all around, such as script kiddies. They are also very useful for identifying internal threats such as unauthorized access to the database. These approaches give you a lot of information about what has happened, but they don’t actually stop an attacker from getting high-value data.
• Keep data safe when it’s on the move. Of course not all encryption is created equal. Many encryption solutions are like bank vaults — they protect the money, but as soon as the money is moved, or thieves break in and steal the money, the money is out in the open and can be used. So now, many banks use dye protection packs, which make the cash useless if it is stolen, and as soon the cash is removed from the vault the dye packs explode, making it clear the cash has been stolen. A data-centric encryption approach renders stolen data useless to the attacker.
• Protect your keys. Encryption and other types of protection mean there are keys or tables involved that can give you access to the original data. These must be protected too. The best security solutions have keys that are never stored, so they can’t be stolen. The keys are computed only as needed. The recent RSA SecureID breach illustrates that hackers are getting more sophisticated and are going after keys.
• Make yourself less of a target. The price for credit card data has dropped from $500 per “gold” card to less than $50, driving attackers to plan and execute more-sophisticated attacks designed to pull out more valuable data. This includes trade secrets, legal documents, more complete customer records than can be mined for high-net-worth individuals, etc. Hackers look for the highest reward, profits or publicity, with the lowest protections in place. If they hack you and all they get is encrypted data, they will move on.

We can win

We can beat the bad guys. We have the technology to stop these new advanced persistent threats. Data-centric protection focuses on encrypting the digital assets, emails, documents, database records, in a way that they remain encrypted wherever they go. If they are stolen, those assets cannot be used, credit cards will not validate, emails will show up garbled and documents will not reveal their contents.

Format Preserving Encryption (FPE/FFX), which is the encryption technology underlying data-centric encryption, is being standardized by NIST and is backed by several solution providers like Voltage, Verifone and Ingenico. With Shady RAT, data-centric encryption would not have stopped the programs from taking the data, but they would prevent the attackers from using it. Data–centric encryption turns gold into straw, making the data useless.

Matt Pauker is the co-founder of Voltage Security.

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The legislation potential in question was the fact that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, along with NIST, maintained the ability to step into the standards process and pick standards if the industry failed to meet a consensus. For example, back in 2009, George Arnold, the official in charge of the NIST smart grid standards process, reportedly “threw down the gauntlet,” as the EETimes described it, and told an industry-filled audience that if the industry doesn’t work out a standard for smart appliance connections, NIST might end up picking one.

But despite that smart appliance flap back in 2009, the members of the round table praised the NIST process for helping deliver reliable standards so quickly in such a new industry. The move to open standards has moved much more quickly in the smart grid industry because NIST brought together vendors and educated them on this process, said Vaswani. Mark Chandler, general counsel for Cisco, which competes with Silver Spring on smart grid networking, called what NIST did “critical,” to drive the move to open standards forward, and creating preconditions for the industry to be successful.

Duke Law School Professor of Law Arti Rai said the NIST smart grid standards process was a good model to for other new industries that are made up of such various sectors. The smart grid brings together such differing groups as IT companies, power companies, consumer electronics groups, appliance makers, and telecoms.

The smart grid standards-making process was one of the most condensed, complex standards work to date, particularly because there was a rush to quickly deliver a smart grid standards road map before the $4 billion were allocated from the stimulus package. Given the process went so quickly there was a lot of room for missteps, but it sounds like overall the industry was satisfied with the results. But remember, the industry is still so new — there’s plenty of room for standards battles and Stuxnet discussions ahead.

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Photo courtesy TpolyG

While ActaCell has already raised $5.8 million from investors including Google.org, DFJ Mercury and Applied Ventures (Applied Materials venture arm), this $3 million award (over three years) could offer the Austin, Tex.-based startup a significant boost.

Founded in 2007, ActaCell is working to commercialize low-cost, high-power lithium-ion cell materials based on technology developed in the Material Science and Engineering labs of professor Arumugam Manthiram at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to ActaCell’s work on materials for the anode (which draws in lithium ions when a battery recharges) and cathode of a battery, the company says it’s also working on battery cell and pack designs, and it has developed a module for demonstration in hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicle applications.

ActaCell’s latest funding comes through the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Technology Innovation Program, or TIP. The program, which announced a total of $22 million in awards on Wednesday, is designed to support high-risk, high-reward research projects focused on areas of critical national importance.

Throughout 2010, companies including A123 Systems and Amprius — another startup working on anode technology — have scored funds under the program. The latest round, which drew 110 proposals, was specifically for developing more efficient, lower cost, less wasteful and faster manufacturing processes for industries including renewable fuels, energy storage and advanced pharmaceuticals.

With the NIST funds and additional investment to meet cost-sharing requirements (total project costs are estimated at $6.2 million), ActaCell aims to scale up production of its novel nanocomposite material for lithium battery anodes by a factor of 1,000. Eventually, according to ActaCell’s project description, this could enable “safe, powerful and economical batteries for electric vehicles and other demanding applications.”

While ActaCell claims its anode material is “in principle, significantly less expensive to produce” than state-of-the-art alternatives, the company is still working with small lab-scale batches. “To be commercially viable,” the company says it needs to bring production up to 5-kilogram batches, from five grams today.

What’s the plan? ActaCell’s proposal for a low-cost manufacturing innovation involves what’s called “reactive high energy milling” — a technique that has yet to be applied at commercial scale in the lithium battery industry. According to the NIST project description, “The scale-up of this synthesis process will be a key innovation not only in the lithium-ion battery industry, but also as a low-cost manufacturing technique for other related materials.”

“Inventing disruptive manufacturing innovations is every bit as hard as inventing new materials,” Frank van Mierlo, President and co-founder of solar startup 1366 Technologies, told me in an interview last year. Clean technologies ranging from energy storage for plug-in vehicles to photovoltaics need both kinds of inventions in order to compete with the old standbys (internal combustion engine cars and fossil fuels). As shuttered startups like Imara and Firefly Energy have illustrated in the last couple years, it’s one thing to develop a breakthrough material in the lab with potential to deliver better batteries — but it’s another to be able to produce that material at commercial scale at reasonable cost. With this new funding, ActaCell has until early 2014 to try to figure out that second half.

Image courtesy of ActaCell

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But the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Technology Innovation Program has doled out $71 million in awards to companies including A123Systems and Amprius in recent months, and this morning it announced a new round of funding available for high-risk, potentially high-reward research projects. The idea is to develop more efficient, lower cost, less wasteful and faster ways of producing biofuels, as well as products from other “process-based industries,” such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

“New materials have the potential to open whole new markets for novel or dramatically-improved manufactured products,” NIST notes in its release this morning. But taking those innovations from the lab and moving them into commercial production, “remains a major challenge for manufacturers.”

Many greentech startups have become all too familiar with that challenge. Battery developer Firefly Energy stopped operating last month after being unable to cross what’s known as the valley of death — the gap between proving a technology and scaling. And battery startup Imara shut down last winter after a year’s delay in scaling up operations and stymied fundraising efforts. Meanwhile, algae fuel developer Solazyme has been around for seven years and raised more than $76 million, but has yet to reach commercialization.

Clean technologies ranging from energy storage for plug-in vehicles to photovoltaics to biofuels need both kinds of inventions in order to lower costs enough to compete with conventional options (e.g. gas engine cars and fossil fuels).

As Lux Research explained in a report earlier this year, the race to scale represents a make-or-break contest for many next-gen biofuel developers, which have a chance to secure funds under NIST’s program. Achieving low enough costs to compete with petroleum counterparts, “can only happen at commercial scale,” according to Lux. And, “companies that get there first — due to favorable funding, government assistance, or operational excellence — will have the best prospects even if their technology isn’t the absolute best in class.”

Around $25 million is at stake in this latest competition under the Technology Innovation Program, or TIP, which expects to help fund work on 25 research initiatives for up to five years. Awards can be as much as $3 million over three years for a solo company effort, or up to $9 million for joint venture projects taking place over five years.

Update #1: NIST spokesperson Michael Baum has confirmed with us in an email that biofuels projects, as well as biomanufacturing “certainly _could_ qualify for an award under this TIP competition,” depending on the nature of the project. He noted that,”The important thing to understand is that TIP is looking for novel, path-breaking technology in these areas, not projects that are simply proposing an incremental improvement on existing practice.” While the Federal Funding Opportunity announcement and NIST’s white paper on advancing critical manufacturing processes focus heavily on biopharmaceuticals as an example, Baum said similar opportunities likely exist in biofuels manufacturing.

Update #2: Several days after sending us that initial email, Baum has now reached out to tell us that he inadvertently gave us the wrong information about this latest TIP program. “The biomanufacturing sectors targeted by the current competition are those focused on the production of complex biopharmaceuticals,” he explained. The Federal Funding Opportunity Announcement, he said, excludes biomanufacturing projects that focus on processes for “production of non-biopharmaceutical products, e.g. production of biofuels or small molecule drugs),” among other categories. “TIP competitions are generally very focused and necessarily limited by the funds we have available,” Baum explained, adding that while biofuels are not included in this TIP competition, “NIST has been active in supporting biofuels research over the years.”

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