Asian markets are growing at a fast pace and Silver Spring is trying to get a toe hold into the region. Dresselhuys says utilities in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos and even India, look to Singapore Power as a leader. The utility has 2 million customers, and the deal is actually with the company’s division that owns the electricity transmission and distribution, SP PowerAssets.

The pace of the growth of smart meters in the U.S. has been expected to slow down in 2013 and 2014, and then pick back up, according to Pike Research. That’s partly because the early adopter utilities in states like California have already adopted smart meters. The temporary drop is also because the Department of Energy stimulus funds gave smart meters a temporary pop a couple years ago. Networks in some states, like ComEd’s, have faced other types of logistics hurdles.

Outside of the U.S. there’s a lot of growth going on, and particularly in developing countries where economies are booming. Silver Spring has already built networks in Australia, but is looking hard at Latin America. According to Pike Research, while less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, and is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020.

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And for just about as long, people have dreamed of mining them. But dreaming and doing are far apart, and the Japanese research project is only a tiny step towards the economical and safe exploitation of methane hydrates. Before that reality, a number of very significant advances have to be made:

1). Environmental containment: Methane hydrates are ice crystals with a few molecules of methane trapped inside. But the crystals aren’t blocks of ice like what is in your freezer. They are lattice-like frames that crumble very easily. Thus any disturbance to a methane hydrate bed can lead to a cascade of collapsing crystals, followed by one big belch of methane gas from the seabed.

This is bad for two reasons. The gas you want to mine can get out of your grasp, and the bubble of valuable hydrocarbons now enters the atmosphere, where it collects heat at nearly twenty times the rate of carbon dioxide. Some even speculate that methane burps from the seabed caused ancient global warming incidents.

How do you stick a drill-pipe into a sediment that has a consistency of cobwebs, without disturbing it? There’s probably an answer out there waiting to be discovered — but nobody knows how to do it today. And there’s no sign that the Japanese drilling experiment is successfully doing so.

2). Economics: Most methane hydrate deposits exist underneath dozens or hundreds of feet of mud and gravel. Where the mud stops and the methane starts is a very blurry line. Thus the fluid that’s brought to the surface will include an enormous amount of extraneous material. That’s a problem that can be solved relatively easily, but not cheaply.

Separating the methane from everything else will be an enormously expensive task that far exceeds the separation requirements of current “tight” natural gas resources (such as coal-seam methane and shale gas). There’s no simple way around that cost, which means the extraction costs of seabed methane will always be higher than any other gas deposits. At current natural gas prices of $3.64 per MMBTU, there’s no reason for anyone to invest in methane hydrate projects.

3). Infrastructure: There is no industrial infrastructure currently built to mine, process and deliver methane from seabed deposits. Unlike traditional underground formations that are highly concentrated, seabed methane beds are spread out over extremely large areas.

To eventually extract that methane will probably require specialized floating infrastructure that can follow the resource. While certainly not a deal-killer, the creation of an entirely new infrastructure to gather the hydrates and turn them into usable fuel is a good reason to not spend a few tens of billions of dollars on all-new, untested equipment.

While some of the breathless reports about the Japanese “discovery” (there’s really nothing special about the Japanese project, several other Japanese and Canadian experiments have successfully brought up methane from hydrate beds) claim that a brand new fossil fuel resource has been stumbled upon, the facts are a little less fantastical.

Yes, there is an enormous amount of methane laying on the world’s seabeds. And yes, there are probably some ways to get it to the surface. But the chances are that most of it will continue to sit there for centuries to come.

This article originally appeared on the blog of Pike Research. Pike Research, a part of Navigant Consulting’s global Energy Practice, is a market research and consulting team that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets. Pike Research is also a partner of GigaOM Pro, GigaOM’s premium research service.

Image courtesy of shunkoh, Flickr Creative commons.

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There’s a lot we don’t know about exactly what happened when the lights went out in the Super Bowl. But here’s what we do know:

Not all the lights went out: One-third of the lights stayed on throughout that excruciating half hour.  That probably means that the uninterruptable power supply system worked as planned.  The only problem was that the UPS system was sized to one-third the necessary power needs of the stadium.

The lights weren’t the only things going out:  The CBS announcers lost power, as apparently did the top-level cameras and the coaches’ communications systems.  This points to a failure in wiring the building’s critical circuits.  By far the most important thing to keep going in the case of an emergency (after emergency lighting and the PA system, both of which worked) is the power to the television operations.  Television is what pays everyone’s bills, so that should have priority over other systems.  It did not.  Likewise, the fact that one team’s communications systems continued to work (the 49ers’) and the other’s didn’t (the Ravens), showed that someone didn’t think very clearly when designing the critical circuit design.

LEDs Still Shone: If you looked carefully at the scenes of the blackened sections of the stadium seating, you could see that the emergency stair lights were all still lit.  Likewise, the exterior colored lighting that bathes the outside walls of the stadium in light was still working.  That’s because it’s made up of LEDs, which consume a fraction of a percentage of the power required by the sodium high intensity discharge (HID) lamps used for the rest of the stadium lighting.  Additionally, the sodium HIDs, once they went out, took another 20 minutes to regain their full luminosity.  LED’s, on the other hand, require no warm-up time and sip so little electricity that managing the current for them is a much less complex task.

Engineers & Repairmen

Based on this knowledge, here are three important lessons learned from the power management debacle that was Super Bowl XLVII:

• Right-sizing a UPS backup microgrid is about more than just installing a bunch of generators.  The art of designing a backup microgrid is about balancing the maximum number of diesel gen-sets with the minimal amount of load.  Physical space for backup gen-sets is almost always limited (especially in a flood plain like New Orleans, where generators have to be placed – at a minimum – on the second floor).  Thus keeping the blackout from happening was more of a failure of critical circuit design than of generator management.
• Energy efficiency counts more than backup power in times of emergency.  The failure of the sodium HID lights and the long warm-up time they require would have been solved by energy efficient LED lights, which also would have reduced the load on the UPS system.
• Electrical design engineers are always more valuable than electric repairmen.  Designing the critical circuits to be prioritized during a power failure is a job worth doing right, as we saw on Sunday evening.  The designers of the Superdome’s UPS circuitry got some things very right: the success of the emergency lighting system kept the crowd from panicking.  But the problems with the broadcasting and team communications systems showed that not everything was so well-planned.

This article originally appeared on the blog of Pike Research. Pike Research, a part of Navigant Consulting’s global Energy Practice, is a market research and consulting team that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets. Pike Research is also a partner of GigaOM Pro, GigaOM’s premium research service.

Image courtesy of delgaudm, Flickr creative commons.

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The solar industry calls this technology “building-integrated photovoltaics” or BIPV. Some of this new capacity will come from thin film solar panels that will be able to be printed right onto building materials, like shingles, steel roof casing, and windows. A lot of companies have been gunning for this market, and many have been held back by the difficult solar production market in 2012. There are at least 53 companies working on this tech, says Pike.

Dow launched its solar shingle product about a year ago in Colorado and began selling them in California and Texas earlier this year. Miasole, which was sold to China’s Hanergy in a firesale, had been working on BIPV, as had Arizona-based Global Solar Energy, which recently started layoffs and curbed manufacturing. Dozens of solar module makers went bankrupt or struggled in 2012, due to an oversupply and rock bottom prices.

But the BIPV market could provide a bright spot, says the Pike report. The value of the BIPV market could quadruple over the next five years from $606 million in 2012 to $2.4 billion in 2017. The market will also be encouraged by a rebound of home sales and construction.

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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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The companies didn’t release terms of the deal. Tropos has 55 employees and is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Tropos’ customers include Burbank Water and Power, Anderson Municipal Power and Light, DTE Energy, Glendale Water and Power, and a variety of other municipal utilities.

ABB, and other power companies like Siemens, have been on acquisition sprees in recent months, buying up hardware and software companies to add digital intelligence to their power gear products. Siemens bought eMeter late last year. ABB also invests in startups through its venture arm and the power company has invested around $100 million into energy-related startups over the past two years.

The smart grid has been a hot area of investment, and will continue to grow globally, though will likely slow down a bit in the U.S. over the next two years. Less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, and that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, according to Pike Research. The numbers of smart meters installed is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020.

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Pike Research predicts that there will be 10 trends that shape this growing market over the next decade, like that they think building automation systems will shift over to using Internet Protocol as their basic standard, away from more conflicting and proprietary communication standards. Here’s Pike’s 10 predictions for the smart building market:

1). Cloud: These building energy management systems will largely live in the cloud. It might sound obvious, but for the older-school building industry it’s been revolutionary.

2). Partnerships: The vendors that offer building energy management systems right now are pretty fragmented. Some of the larger players are trying to provide end-to-end systems, and then there’s the startups that have new, novel ideas. Partnerships are emerging as a key way to grow the market.

3). M&A: On that note, large companies buying small ones is a major trend. See the list at the bottom.

4). China: Yeah we know China always seems to land on any of these lists, but it’s going to be a massive driver of growth. It’s building a lot of new commercial and factory building space and will provide itself on including the latest smart building tech.

5). Federal friends: The U.S federal government has emerged as a major customer and partner for companies offering energy services.

6). Standards shake out: The multitude of protocols are converging, but eventually everything will go to IP.

7). No more manual demand response: Demand response — the act of shifting energy consumption at a certain time when more energy is needed — is going all automatic. Previously much of this was done manually, but finally the service is entering the modern digital world.

8). Submeters! If you don’t know what submeters are, check ‘em out. Pike says they’ll be big one day.

9). Design from the ground up: Building information systems aren’t just shaping how buildings run, but they’re remaking how buildings are designed, too.

10). We are all one: The smart building is the smart grid, and vice versa.

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One reason for the drop is because utilities in California — one of the leading states to install smart meters in the U.S. — will have finished many of the smart meter installation projects that they started a few years ago. PG&E installed close to 9 million meters by the end of 2011, and will finish its deployments by the middle of 2012. Southern California Edison has installed 4.3 million smart meters to date (close to its end goal) and likewise plans to complete all of its installations in 2012.

Another reason for the decline is that the Department of Energy gave smart meters a temporary injection a couple years ago. In late 2009, the DOE released billions of dollars for utilities’ smart grid programs, many of which included smart meter installations — 18 million meters were supposed to be installed with these funds. Many of these projects have gotten underway and either have already been completed or will be completed in the short term.

Pike Research vice president Bob Gohn writes that smart meter shipments over the next two years are facing “very dynamic and even volatile regional market characteristics, with dramatic shifts over the forecast period and very different communications technologies and standards. These swings make the market both enticing and challenging for smart meter and communications vendors.”

While this short term decline in U.S. smart meter shipments might cause hiccups for smart meter vendors and smart meter network makers, globally smart meter markets look just fine. While less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, and is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020, according to Pike Research.

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This report originally appeared on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

In the emerging vision for the smart city of tomorrow, we often hear about next generation smart grids, smarter buildings that manage themselves to conserve resources, and smart transportation systems that will lessen congestion.

In fact, Pike Research’s Eric Woods recent report for GigaOM Pro, “Key Technologies for the Future of the Smart City” (subscription required) estimated that the global market for smart city investments will reach $16 billion by 2020 with heavy growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

But we hear much less about smart water systems for the smart city, and the need to develop more efficient approaches to water as a resource. Part of this is basic developed world bias. A brief look at the U.N.’s freshwater availability map shows that nations with water stress (less than 1700 cubic meters per person per year) and water scarcity (less than a 1000) are mainly found in the Middle East, parts of Africa, China and Southeast Asia. Most of the developed world has been lucky enough to grow up in areas of relative water abundance.

Urbanization is accelerating, however, with a billion and half people expected to move to the city in the next 20 years, and McKinsey has predicted that by 2030 water consumption will increase by 40 percent. There have been signs of problems in international megacities like Mexico City where 5 million residents awoke to dry taps in 2009 and Mumbai where 5,000 tankers deliver 50 million liters of water each day, the precious resource going to the highest bidders. Even domestically, many continue to point out that with less than 15 inches of annual rainfall and its dependence on water from the Colorado River, where demand is expected to overwhelm supply in the next half century, Los Angeles’s water supply is risky.

One of the first implementations of smart water systems is smart water meters. A report last year pegged the European smart water meter market at 13 billion pounds by 2020, which is interesting given the fact that there are far fewer top down government mandates for smart water meter deployment than there have been for smart meters for the electricity grid. By 2030 Britain hopes to have all homes installed with smart water meters, which utilities use to identify leaks, create peak pricing mechanisms to incentivize conservation, and catch people who are violating water use restrictions. Designs are already circulating that sync water meters with iPads to give users up to the minute info on their water use, which could drive home to consumers the cost of watering that lawn.

Woods’s report for GigaOM Pro examined next generation greenfield communities like Masdar City in the United Arab Emerates (UAE). Masdar City use 54 percent less water than the average UAE city and Woods notes that the city is deploying diverse strategies from micro-irrigation to treated wastewater for landscaping to highly efficient water fittings. The goal is to get to 180 liters per day per person from the current norm of 550 liters per person per day in the UAE.

But in the developing world, where 1 billion of the 3 billion global urban dwellers live in slums with limited access to clean water and additional water management challenges brought on by climate change induced flooding and droughts, the solutions may be less technological. The solutions in the urban developing world revolve around limiting demand, reducing pollution to the water ecosystem, and preventing leakage from aging infrastructure. Though there is evidence that municipalities are starting to take the initiative, as the city of Mumbai has been working with global meter giant Itron to deploy advance water metering infrastructure. One of the issues is how expensive water has become for the urban poor. A slum dweller in Nairobi, Kenya pays 5 to 7 times more for a liter of water than the average North American.

For the first time in history more Chinese now live in cities than in rural areas with per capita income for Chinese city dwellers three times that of rural citizens. The economic drivers of urbanization will remain strong which means cities will have to get more intelligent in their management of water resources. And that goes for all cities, from Mumbai to LA.

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