Pike Research

10 trends for smarter buildings

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,

The importance of water management to the smart city

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.

Vehicle-to-grid tech to connect only 100K cars by 2017

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.

How clean is your cloud, really?

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.

Big data meets the smart grid

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.

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.

Cloud Computing Will Save Energy? Not So Simple

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.

The Power Grid Is So Dumb That…

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.

Clean Energy to Power 4.5% of Cell Phone Base Stations

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.

The Billions of Dollars Behind Korea's Smart Grid

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.