Silver Spring Networks has scored a deal with a Singapore utility as its first win in Asia. The company hopes other utilities in Asia will follow, given the region is supposed to have significant growth coming. Read more »
Dreaming and doing are far apart. Here’s three potential problems — from environmental containment to economics to infrastructure — for mining natural gas from the sea in Japan. Read more »
There’s at least three lessons we can learn about the future of grid architecture, and next-gen lighting from the Superbowl blackout. Read more »
Solar panels that can be integrated right into roofs and walls could provide a bright spot in a difficult solar market over the next five years, according to a new report from Pike Research. Read more »
There are only a little over 500 deployed energy storage projects in the world, according to Pike Research. So what’s the hold up? Here’s three hurdles facing energy storage grid projects. Read more »
Swiss power giant ABB plans to acquire wireless mesh networking company Tropos Networks, the companies announced on Friday. Read more »
Pike Research predicts that the market for building energy management systems will grow from $1.9 billion in 2011 to $6 billion in 2020 and there will be 10 trends that shape this growing market over the next decade, Read more »
Smart meters eventually will be ubiquitous globally over the next few decades, but, interestingly enough, installations of smart meters in the U.S. will actually sharply decline over the next two years, before they pick back up, according to Pike Research. Read more »
In the emerging vision for the smart city of tomorrow, we often hear about next gen smart grids, smarter buildings and smart transportation systems. But we hear much less about smart water systems and the need to develop more efficient approaches to water as a resource. Read more »
As utility industry trade show DistribuTECH wrapped up last Thursday, attendees got a peek at not only new product offerings — from smart thermostats to software platforms that manage smart meter data — but also the potential for what a utility of the future might look ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
One day, electric car batteries will be used as energy storage for the grid. But that day will be pretty far in the future. According to a report from Pike Research, only about 100,000 electric cars will have this so-called vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, capability by 2017. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Clean is as clean does when it comes to cloud computing and green data centers. Much has been said about how cloud computing boosts energy efficiency as data centers move off old tech and into the cloud. But there’s more to being green than energy use. Read more »
The market for smart grid data analytics — software and services that can mine data and provide intelligence for smart grid vendors, utilities and consumers — could reach a cumulative $11.3 billion between 2011 to 2015, according to Pike Research. Read more »
Some of the best ideas on our network sometimes come from reader comments. In response to our piece last week on Why the LinkedIn IPO is Bad For Cleantech, commenter Bill Hewitt, I think hit a nerve with his suggestion: “Clean tech has gone beyond VC.” Read more »
As energy management becomes decentralized, there’s a great opportunity for apps to help direct the flow. At Green:Net, three experts discussed how the responsibility for managing the smart grid will fall on the utilities, but the process will bring trading-floor approaches down to the consumer level. Read more »
At Green:Net next week, we’ll be exploring how adding IT technologies to anything from the power grid, to data centers, to buildings, to lighting can lead to energy efficiency and a more sustainable consumption of increasingly-constrained resources. 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 »
Pike Research digs into some of the complexities of its Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency report in a bit more detail. Read more »
The analysts at Pike Research came out with a report this morning that claims that the adoption of cloud computing will lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy use by 2020. I’d like to respectfully disagree with such a simplistic finding. 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 »
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 »
Just what the nascent plug-in vehicle market needs: A rockstar’s plug-in car catches on fire. Neil Young’s famous LincVolt plug-in car — a 1959 Lincoln Continental converted to electric — caught on fire after what looks to be an untested bit of the charging infrastructure sparked. Read more »
Ener1 has a $40 million deal to supply Russia’s Federal Grid Company (FGC) with batteries to back up the grid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Read more »
It’ll be a long road for algae biofuel producers to make any significant dent in the world’s overall fuel supply. How long? Consider this: By 2020, the algae biofuel industry is likely to produce only 61 million gallons per year globally, Pike Research said Wednesday. Read more »
Tesla Motors expects to reap about $60 million from Toyota for its work developing technology for an electric version of the Japanese automaker’s RAV4 SUV, according to a filing with financial regulators this afternoon. Read more »
Over the next five years green data center gear will grow from a relatively niche market into almost a third of the overall data center market, according to Pike Research. Read more »
The power grid is so dumb that a decades-old networking technology, which has disappeared from pretty much all other industries and has 8,000 times less bandwidth of current average networks, is still one of the most common choices for digitally connecting parts of the power grid. Read more »
Despite all of the rhetoric around, and government support for, a U.S. standards-based smart grid, proprietary communications technology will reign supreme for years to come, according to a report out from Pike Research. Read more »
When there’s no power grid in sight, cellular network operators turn to expensive and dirty diesel generators. But according to a report this morning, 4.5 percent of the world’s cellular base stations will run off of solar and wind by 2014, up from 0.11 percent in 2010. Read more »
What happens to an industry when the price of a core component suddenly drops, the credit crisis hits, and countries look to pull crucial subsidies? Well, for the traditional solar industry that means 2010 will be a year of “gross oversupply.” Read more »
In a few years, we’ll look back at 2010 and remember it as the year that LEDs (light emitting diodes) turned a corner and went from a pricey niche lighting technology to a mainstream contender. Read more »
Korea famously invested in its national broadband infrastructure and vaulted itself into a position as a world leader for mobile, Internet and consumer electronics innovation. Can the country do the same for the smart grid? It will certainly be spending the money to try. 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 mainstay […] Read more »
When I think about smart grid security I get a tired-feeling like I’m being forced to watch the Bachelor on TV. That’s because the debate is largely over around how important it is (it is very), the U.S. government and standards bodies are taking it extremely […] Read more »
What happens when you combine an “old school” netbook with cutting edge mobile broadband? You get a subsidized netbook deal with WiMAX, of course! Liliputing caught an eyeful of just such a deal on the Clear website. And if you live in a WiMAX coverage area, […] Read more »
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has likened the current state of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to a half-baked web tool in need of debugging, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful forces driving the growth of the CCS industry. Those forces — the need to […] Read more »
Looks like there’s a solid reason for all these companies developing home energy management tools. Pike Research published a report this morning that says that 28.1 million consumers will be using home energy management tools worldwide by 2015, which is significant growth, but still a “nascent […] Read more »
The wind power industry is more developed than most types of renewable energy, but one segment — small wind power systems with turbines of 100 kilowatts or less — is just beginning to pick up steam. These systems, buoyed by government incentives and increased interest in […] Read more »
While the debate over how — or if — consumers will want to manage their home energy consumption makes a lot of headlines, commercial buildings suck up 18 percent of the total energy consumption in the U.S. and represent one of the biggest opportunities for energy […] Read more »
