Will 2011 bring recovery or retrenchment for the greentech industry? We’re tracking both the leaders and up-and-comers in the solar power, smart grid, biofuel, green vehicle and energy efficiency sectors, to discover the role that old-school energy industries are going to play in the greentech evolution. Read more »
2010 was a year of ups and downs for the smart grid industry. Here are my thoughts on what needs to happen — both across the industry and with some of the individual players — for this sector to hit a home run in 2011. 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 »
Grid Net, the smart grid software maker, has officially moved beyond the wireless standard WiMAX and this morning announced that its software now supports the 4G wireless standard LTE (Long Term Evolution), the dominate next-gen wireless standard embraced by U.S. telcos. Read more »
China is expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on grid modernization over the next five years. Where are the openings for Western smart grid investors and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
China plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade on a nationwide smart grid, but where are the opportunities for outside investors and innovators? Read more »
What makes a smart grid pilot a success — even when it’s a failure? General Electric and Accenture spent an hour Wednesday with some energy industry big shots at the World Economic Forum in Atlanta and explained it all to us. Read more »
OpenADR may be the open demand response technology of the future, but right now one vendor — Honeywell — has a lock on the market. That may be about to change, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Honeywell bought a lock on a key piece of technology for OpenADR deployments when it bought Akuacom this summer. But challengers are emerging with OpenADR server products of their own. Read more »
Energy Secretary Steven Chu stopped by Google headquarters on Friday to talk about green technology. He would like China to invest in America’s green future, not own it. To challenge China’s growing lead, the U.S. may have to boost its support of homegrown technologies. Read more »
Smart grid trade show GridWeek is wrapping up in Washington D.C., but the hard work of integrating all the hardware and software on display has just begun. Read more »
Schneider Electric likes to say that 70 percent of the world’s electrons flow through its equipment. What’s it doing to make those electrons flow more intelligently? Read more »
Ice is nice, but so is cash. The startup that builds an ice-based energy storage and air conditioning system for buildings — Ice Energy — announced this morning that it has raised a $24 million Series C round of funding. Read more »
GE is stretching out further along the network of the smart grid. This morning, GE said it has acquired Australian company Opal Software, which makes software and services for smart grid network testing and management. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Read more »
This week, Verizon announced a partnership with smart grid player SmartSynch for a 3G network solution for utilities’ residential deployments. The news comes about a year after AT&T first announced a trial of a cellular-based smart grid with its network and SmartSynch’s technology. Read more »
A state court has ruled that the IC was wrong to allow utility Commonwealth Edison to pass on certain costs to its customers, including the $5 million passed on to customers in 2008 for a smart grid pilot project now getting underway. Read more »
Could superconducting cable revolutionize the way electric grids operate? American Superconductor believes so, and plans to test it out in projects including one on South Korea’s smart grid test bed of Jeju Island. Read more »
In the building energy management sector, mid-size commercial properties like restaurants and stores are relegated to the industry’s untouched middle territory. But the right combination of low-cost and enhanced customer service could crack open this untapped ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Because of the catalyst of the stimulus funds, many of the 4G smart grid networks that Alcatel Lucent is helping utility customers build right now are based on WiMAX. Go figure. Read more »
Intel has made no secret of its ambition for a fat slice of the home energy management market, but here’s the chip maker’s official play: a hardware design blueprint based on its Atom chip for any manufacturer that wants to build and sell home energy monitoring devices. Read more »
As consumers adopt smartphones and mobile broadband becomes more ubiquitous, smarter homes will become more common, with brains enabled by machine-to-machine network technologies, mobile applications for monitoring and control, and Internet connectivity to keep homeowners in the loop. I’ve been experimenting with just such a system. Read more »
Big demand response players are leveraging their middleman role between utilities and customers to apply their technology in to fields traditionally defined as smart grid. Given the way the market is developing, they may have little choice. Read more »
Smart meters get all the attention, but smart distribution grid and substation projects are actually taking the lead in smart grid spending across the nation, and corporate giants are reaping the benefit. That’s the gist of a Cleantech Group report released by the DOE Thursday. Read more »
In most states utilities raise electricity rates in order to pay for the installation of new gear like smart meters — so consumers basically cover the cost of the upgrade. But some consumers and PUCs aren’t so happy about those terms. Read more »
Look out, smart meter startups with IPO dreams — the granddaddy of power metering is plugging into the public markets. Elster Group, the German electric, gas and water metering giant founded in 1848, announced this week that it was filing to go public. Read more »
What if the most successful home energy-saving technology ends up being the one people have to opt out of? Utilities can sign customers up for programs automatically, unless they actively choose not to join. Companies targeting the home energy management space should remember this powerful tool. Read more »
The way that smart grid companies have been recently touting “IPV6,” you’d think the geeky numbering system was the next hot killer app. It’s not: praising IPV6 today is like a group of librarians in the 80s swooning over the Dewey Decimal system. Read more »
Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems officially opened up its stimulus money-funded battery factory in Michigan, which will eventually reach 600 megawatt hours of annual production capacity, and, according to the company, represents the largest lithium ion battery plant for electric vehicles in the U.S. Read more »
According to a survey released by Apple watcher Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray, the antenna issues cost the company a decent amount of business over the summer. But it wasn’t what hurt it the most in the U.S. That was the lack of a Verizon option. Read more »
Yet more evidence that the smart grid industry is facing pressure to get cheaper, and fast: Michigan utility Consumers Energy may be cutting $400 million from its $500 million smart grid spending plan over the next five years, reports Smart Grid Today. Read more »
The startups that have teamed up to build a transmission hub to connect the U.S.’s three major grids are adding another startup player for energy storage. Tres Amigas has partnered with Xtreme Power, which provides groups of batteries for energy storage for the power grid. Read more »
A wave of new connected devices — from cameras to heart monitors to your refrigerator — will present a host of security concerns as the Internet of things begins to get legs. But those same issues will mean big opportunities for vendors of mobile security software. Read more »
LightSquared, a company with plans to build a nationwide Long Term Evolution wireless network has found its first customer in Airspan Networks, a provider of connectivity to utilities for their smart grid efforts. Airspan said it will resell some of LightSquared’s 1.4 GHz spectrum. Read more »
A worm that uses a Microsoft Windows vulnerability to penetrate control systems for the not-so-smart grid is just the beginning of how increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks could target the power grid. And the current power grid network isn’t smart or secure enough to handle them. 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 »
ECOtality CEO Jonathan Read described the company’s new Blink smart charging stations for electric vehicles as a “Swiss army knife of telecommunication,” designed to connect with local area networks, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and cell phone networks. Can Read build a business with these stations? Read more »
Online invoicing service FreshBooks today announced a new integration with Salesforce, enabling Salesforce users to automatically bill through FreshBooks without leaving the Saleforce interface. The integration is made possible through the use of a third-party app, DataSynch OnDemand for FreshBooks & Salesforce by Pervasive Software. Read more »
Greenpeace is lauding Apple while chastising Dell this morning. The do-gooders sent out a note pointing out that, while Apple’s iPhone’s are free of chemicals, Dell still hasn’t implemented a previous commitment to eliminate chemicals by the end of 2009. Read more »
The smart grid is undergoing a massive shift as utilities move from the existing world of proprietary, standards-based legacy technologies towards an architecture that will require a much greater degree of interoperability and use of open standards. Despite barriers that currently prevent widespread adoption, the fact that it is possible at all to apply open source models is a testament to how far the utility industry has come in the past few years. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Many users shy away from using IRC as it’s perceived to be complex and difficult to use — an impression not helped by the design of many IRC clients. Colloquy is different — it’s an open-source IRC client for OS X that’s easy-to-use and looks great. Read more »
