Tropos & Itron Deliver Soup-to-Nuts Smart Grid Network
Itron and Tropos Networks say they can roll smart meter neighborhood networks and backhaul networks into one system, and they’ve landed Michigan utility DTE to try it out. Read more »
Google, Kansas City and the Nation’s Gigabit Economic Policy
Want to improve the economy? Then demand better broadband. Policymakers at all levels of government need to watch municipal efforts such as those in Kansas City, Kan. with Google’s fiber network. That gigabit network could prove the link between broadband and economic development. Read more »
LEED To Embrace Demand Response
Green buildings, meet demand response. The U.S. Green Building Council wants to find ways to count buildings’ ability to turn down power to help utilities shave peak demand in its LEED rating system. Read more »
PG&E Replacing 1,600 Broken Smart Meters
Utility PG&E has hit another snag with its smart meter roll-out. This afternoon, the company announced it will replace 1,600 of its smart meters, which were manufactured by Landis+Gyr, because of a defect that causes the miscalculation of customer energy bills. Read more »
5 Things You Need to Know About Energy Storage
The Electric Power Research Institute has released a report that lays out energy storage technology options, benefits, performance and costs and how the different technologies play a role in everything from managing the electric grid to managing home energy use. Read more »
VIDEO: Making the Grid Smarter With Energy Finger Prints
While many smart grid technologies use wireless networks, Power Tagging has developed a way to fingerprint energy on the grid using digital signal processing. At Green:Net last week, I interviewed John LoPorto, CEO of Power Tagging, which was one of our 10 Big Ideas winners. Read more »
Will Consumers or Utilities Control the Future Power Grid?
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 »
Consumers Will Lead the Way for Smart Grid Adoption
How do we get consumers to use less energy and to use it smarter? State and local governments might be able to incentivize smart grid rollouts, but to ensure adoption, utilities will need to educate consumers and giving them the right tools, such as peak pricing. Read more »
10 Digital Energy Innovators from Green:Net 2011
For this year’s Green:Net, a team of GigaOM editors and industry insiders chose 10 innovators in the digital energy space to present their “big ideas” for using information technology to fight climate change. Here are some of the insights they shared. Read more »
Cleaner Power and Smart Grid Requires Clear Sales Pitch for Consumers
The future of the power grid is combining clean energy together with the intelligence of the smart grid. But kickstarting that convergence requires some serious salesmanship to convince consumers of the benefit, as NRG Energy’s David Crane and Silver Spring Networks said at Green:Net. Read more »
Green:Net 2011 Live Coverage
Today, at our third-annual Green:Net event, we’re looking at digital energy: how technology can reduce energy consumption and help the environment. The livestream begins at 8:25 PT, and we’ll update this post throughout the day with the liveblogs from the event. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
The smart grid industry’s focus is now shifting to the true purpose of the smart grid movement: applications that will improve the efficiency, reliability and versatility of the electric grid. This report analyzes six key smart grid application trends that will help shape the industry landscape in the years to come: distribution automation, data analytics, demand response, carbon management, home energy management and electric vehicles. The applications that prevail in this new arena will define the smart grid experience for industrial, commercial and residential customers. Along the way, new business opportunities that arise from these applications will become available for the providers of software, systems, devices and services, and enhance customer awareness and control of energy consumption. Companies mentioned in this report include Echelon, Google, EnerNOC, ZigBee and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mixed Signals for Q1 Greentech Investment
Greentech investment trends in the first quarter of 2011 either signal a record-setting expansion for the industry in 2011, or retrenchment in the face of economic and political headwinds — depending on how you look at the numbers. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
Is the greentech industry headed for a breakout year or is it retrenching for hard times to come? The first three months of 2011 provided evidence that could support both assertions, with a big rise in venture capital investment and a big drop-off in global energy financing. Solar power remained the largest green technology sector in terms of venture capital investment, while in the world of electric vehicles, GM’s Chevy Volt hybrid and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf — the first two mainstream plug-in vehicles — hit the showroom floors in significant numbers. Meanwhile the smart grid sector’s relative dearth of VC investment was more than made up for by the massive round of acquisitions. Companies mentioned in this report include NRG Energy, Microsoft, Silver Spring Networks, Tesla and BrightSource Energy. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Energy Enters the Internet Age Tomorrow at Green:Net!
On the day before Earth Day (tomorrow!), the place to be is: Green:Net 2011! Our third annual Green:Net event, which focuses on digital energy and how information technology can be used to create a green economy, kicks off tomorrow bright and early. Read more »
Viridity Energy Takes Demand Response to Military Bases
Viridity Energy is competing for a Defense Department contract to control power use at federal and military facilities, and has already signed up one military base customer. That’s a big prize for a startup, if it can scale to match its demands. Read more »
Smart Grid 3.0: Getting There from Here
A new report describes the idea of the “Smart Grid 3.0,” which will connect mobile devices and location-based services in real time, and critically, an ecosystem of applications that can run across multiple utility networks. Read more »
Can Solar & Smart Grid Speak the Same Language?
Can solar power inverters talk to the smart grid, to help make them a benefit rather than a burden to utilities? Here’s a new standard that could help solar and smart grid get along. Read more »
Schneider Eyes Tyco; Energy Management Tear to Continue?
Schneider’s energy-themed acquisition tear looks like it’s moving to a whole new level. On Monday morning, Bloomberg reported that French electric giant Schneider Electric is eying a take over of Tyco International in part to get ahold of Tyco’s building and industrial energy management systems. Read more »
Green:Net Speaker: Sunil Paul on the “CleanWeb”
Entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who made his first cleantech investment about 9 years ago, is big on the idea of the “CleanWeb,” or using IT to address constrained resources. At Green:Net Paul will give a talk on who’s leading the CleanWeb and why it’s important. Read more »
Mapping the Move to ZigBee 2.0
Moving from the current wireless standard ZigBee to the next-generation ZigBee standard dubbed “Smart Energy Profile 2.0″ is going to be a very big deal for utilities, and smart grid firms. Now we’ve got three months to map out the transition. Read more »
Meet the Money Behind the Smart Grid at Green:Net ’11
The smart grid has one of the hottest acquisition markets in cleantech right now, and at our third annual Green:Net event on April 21 in San Francisco, we’re bringing together the pieces of the smart grid M&A ecosystem. Read more »
FAIL: Energy Savings Foiled by Dastardly Thermostats
Turns out programmable thermostats in our homes are almost as much of a nightmare to figure out as confounding DVRs. According to a recently-published study from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, a significant portion of users of programmable thermostats are incorrectly using them. Read more »
Cleantech Officially Less Cool Than Groupon
Cleantech is losing its mojo to upstarts peddling coupons. These days, it’s not hard to find tech companies, investors and market analysts comparing cleantech to Groupon, which generated a lot of buzz when it turned down a reportedly $5-6 billion offer from Google late last year. Read more »
Power Gear Companies Waking Up to M&A
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 »
Why Buying and Selling Energy Is a Smart Grid Advantage
What’s the purpose of the billion-dollar plus smart grid acquisition surge? According to Schneider Electric, it’s around developing the capacity to be a “true smart grid provider,” which includes procuring energy as well as using IT to manage the grid. Read more »
The Line Between Smart Grids & Smart Buildings Has Blurred
Where do the worlds of smart grid and smart buildings overlap? Over in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro, I review how two big acquisitions last week shed light on just how muddy that line has become. Read more »
PG&E’s Smart Meter Opt-Out Plan: What’s Next?
How will PG&E’s plan to turn off smart meter radios for complaining customers — and charge them extra for service — affect its smart meter plans, and others around the country? Here’s 3 things I’m paying attention to: Read more »
PG&E Picks ‘Radio-Off’ Smart Meter Option
Pacific Gas & Electric has chosen an option for customers who think their smart meter radios might be a health risk: just turn off the radios, and pay the extra charges of having them read manually. Read more »
The U.K.’s Nationwide Smart Meter Cloud Plans
Can the cloud handle the energy and smart meter data of an entire country? The U.K. is working on several nationwide smart meter data clearinghouse projects that could be a start, and companies like IBM are targeting the market. Read more »
Weather Data Is the Next Smart Grid Opportunity
A little bit more weather data can have a substantial monetary payoff when it comes to the smart grid and clean energy sectors, and which will be felt across the spectrum from the individual consumer all the way to the performance of entire industries. Read more »
Shopping List: Smart Grid Acquisitions to Date
There have been so many acquisitions in the smart grid sector as of late; we’ve been updating the tally every couple of months. Since December there have been a couple more, so we’re updating our list once again. Read more »
Alstom Buys UISOL, But Will OpenADR Stay as Open?
French power giant Alstom is buying smart grid software developer UISOL, as it chases competitor Honeywell into an open source way to automate demand response: turning down buildings’ power use to manage peak loads. But how open will OpenADR be after it’s folded in? Read more »
Digi’s Quiet Smart Grid Play: From the Network to the Cloud
Quiet smart grid player Digi International is already providing networking for some of the best-known names in the industry, and it’s aiming to move into the emerging world of cloud-based smart grid services and applications as well. Read more »
China’s Overhyped, and Underhyped, Greentech Boom
China is either the greatest opportunity or the greatest threat the U.S. green technology industry has ever faced — or, according to Chinese greentech experts at Wednesday’s Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, somewhere in between. Read more »
Demand Response “Negawatts” Getting a Pay Day
The federal grid regulator has ruled that the “negawatts” delivered by demand response companies deserve the same market prices as megawatts of generated energy — a ruling that could pay huge dividends for the demand response industry. Read more »
Grid2Home Raises $2.6M for the Open Smart Grid
The open smart grid is here, and players are emerging to build applications and services on top of it. The latest is Grid2Home, which makes smart grid software based on open standards, and according to a filing this morning, has raised $2.6 million. Read more »
The Energy-Aware Cell Tower Network
IBM will help Indian cellular giant Bharti network its 32,000 cell towers for more efficient energy use. Think of it as a smarter way to link lots of little data centers, on a vast, distributed scale. Read more »
Schneider Electric’s Simple Take on Home Energy Management
Schneider Electric launched a bare bones, utility-centric line of home energy management gear on Tuesday, staking its claim to the residential energy market on the premise that homeowners will choose elegant simplicity over flashy high-tech. Read more »
Plug-In Cars Meet Smart Grid, Courtesy of OnStar, Comverge
General Motors has been talking for years about using its OnStar system to hook up the plug-in Chevy Volt to the smart grid and this week gave a peek into how that might happen in partnership with demand response player Comverge. Read more »
