The partnership announced last month between AT&T and SmartSynch to connect household electricity meters to utilities via cellular networks just landed its first customer.

That's Texas-New Mexico Power Co., which has hired the partnership for a pilot project to link up about 10,000 homes with two-way communicating meters. The utility serves about 230,000 customers and is owned by Albuquerque, N.M.-based PNM Resources (NYSE: PNM).

Using public cellular networks is an alternative to the radio frequency mesh systems being used for most residential smart meter deployments in the nation so far. That's the technology being added to smart meters by Silver Spring Networks and Trilliant, as well as that built into meters from companies like Itron and Landis+Gyr.

While Jackson, Miss.-based SmartSynch has been working for years with AT&T to link smart meters via cellular networks at commercial and industrial facilities, bringing that ability to residential meters is a new thing (see Your Electrical Meter Becomes a Cellphone).

AT&T and SmartSynch's 10,000-home deal is quite small compared to the multi-million smart meter deployments using various forms of RF mesh technology. That includes 5 million meters being deployed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., 4.8 million by Southern California Edison, 4.5 million by Florida Power & Light, 2.4 million by CenterPoint Energy, 3 million by Oncor, and 1.9 million by Pepco Holdings Inc., among others.

The pros for utilities in using cellular networks include piggybacking onto an existing communications network rather than having to build one of their own. The cons can include the uncertainty over costs to access that network, versus one the utility owns itself.

But SmartSynch CEO Stephen Johnston said he believes that cellular carriers will continue to cut costs to compete in the growing smart meter networking field.

The Obama administration has called for 40 million smart meters to be deployed across the country, and February's stimulus package included $4.5 billion in grants to be given to so-called "smart grid" projects, which could include smart meter deployments (see Obama Signs Stimulus Package).

Cellular networks are in wider use as so-called "backhaul" networks to carry smart meter data back to utility offices from aggregater devices that serve a local, or neighborhood, area network of meters. That's what KORE Telematics is doing for an 800,000 smart meter project by utility Arizona Public Service, using AT&T’s wireless network, and Verizon serves that purpose for Itron.

In Europe, by the way, power-line carrier technology from companies like Echelon is a popular option for smart meter networking. But U.S. utilities have expressed less interest in the technology, given some differences in the way power grids have been built in Europe versus North America (see Silver Spring Head Down Under).

The National Renewable Energy Lab just came up with a few “Top 10” lists highlighting utilities that offer voluntary program for their customers to pay more for renewable power.

Austin Energy in Texas snagged the No. 1 spot for the selling the most renewable power in 2008. The utility sold nearly 724 million kilowatt hours from renewable power plants that had a total average production capacity of 82.6 megawatts, according to an NREL report.

Excel Energy in Colorado took the No. 1 spot for attracting the highest number of ratepayers to its program. The utility’s program, called Windsource Renewable Energy Trust, had roughly 71,570 participants in 2008.

The City of Palo Alto Utilities in California, on the other hand, won the top spot for a list ranking customer participation rates. Twenty-one percent of the utility’s customer took part in its Palo Alto Green program.

Edmond Electric in Oklahoma topped the list for sales of renewable power as a percentage of the total electricity sales. The amount of wind power sold through the utility Pure & Simple program made up 6.4 percent of its total power sales.

More than 850 utilities in the country offer renewable power purchase programs, which attract consumers who are willing to pay extra on their monthly bills to support green electricity generation. This way, the utilities could keep the rates low for those who don’t want to pay for green power, which costs more to generate than conventional power.

Through those programs, the utilities sold more than 5 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity in 2008, a 20 percent jump from 2007, NREL said. Most of the green power came from wind farms.

Of course, utilities don’t guarantee that they send only renewable power those program participants, since the renewable electricity is mixed with conventional power in the grid.

Some utilities opt for other types of programs that help consumers feel good about their energy use. The Pacific Gas and Electric in California, for example, has a voluntary program, Climate Smart, for its customers to pay about $5 per month to fund greenhouse-gas reduction projects picked by the utility. Some of the money right now goes to a the nonprofit, The Conservation Fund, for managing a forest in Northern California.

You can see the full Top 10 lists at the NREL Website.

The U.S. Department of Energy is doling out $41.9 million to 13 companies to develop and deploy fuel cells, which have largely been relegated to military use.

The grant winners include GENCO, Polyfuel, Plug PowerMTI MicroFuel Cells and ReliOn. The money will come from the stimulus funds. Naturally, the goal here is not just to encourage greentech development, but to create manufacturing and other types of jobs as well.

Fuel cells promise to provide green energy storage for everything from electronic gadgets to cars, but getting the right chemistry and keeping the manufacturing costs low are tricky to do. Many fuel cell companies rely on government research contracts to stay in business. Protonex Technology recently announced a $1.48 million contract from the U.S. Army to develop a solid oxide fuel cell that can run on different kinds of fuels, including biodiesel and butanol.

Fuel cell companies have found some success deploying their products for back-up power systems and industrial equipment such as forklifts, the DOE said. So the government is using the $41.9 million to support those uses.

ReliOn in Spokane, Wash., for example, is getting $8.6 million to deploy 180 fuel cells to provide backup power to AT&T’s wireless network in California. Sprint Communications, based in Reston, Va., is getting $7.3 million to set up backup power systems for its own telecom network. MTI MicroFuel Cells in Albany, N.Y., plans to use its $2.4 million to demonstrate a fuel cell developed for consumer electronics.

Latham, N.Y.-based Plug Power, which has been selling fuel cell packs for forklifts, is getting two grants. It plans to use the first grant ($3.4 million) to carry out a three-year project to demonstrate the use of its 5-kilowatt system to replace conventional furnaces and boilers to provide electricity and heat for residential and business use in California. It will use the second grant ($2.7 million) to install rack-mounted systems for emergency backup power.

Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis will use the $1.1 million to install 23 fuel cell packs in its fleet of forklifts in Fort Collins, Colo. Those forklifts have been using lead-acid batteries.

The 13 grant recipients are expected to contribute $72.4 million of their own funds to match the DOE grants.

Should factories be big or small? It depends what you are making. Some execs like Charlie Gay at Applied Materials have advocated supersizing cell manufacturing facilities. To cut costs and gain economies of scale, they argue that the thing to do is build cell facilities that produce over a gigawatt of cells a year and consume nearly a ton of silicon an hour. OptiSolar, the fast-growing solar company that crashed spectacularly, talked about putting glass factories to make substrates for thin-film cells under the same roof as cell lines.

But when it comes to modules, Roger Little, CEO of equipment maker Spire, says it's better to go small. Put fifty factories capable of churning out 50 megawatts of modules a year, he told me in the hallway at Surviving the Shakeout, a conference we held this week. You could have one in each state.

Why? Policy is one reason. Both the federal government and the various states are linking green technology growth to job growth. In Oregon, for instance, a module maker can potentially qualify for a $3 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment grant and a $5 million grant from state on a $10 million investment in production equipment. (A whole 50-megawatt factory, buildings and all, might run $20 million.). The factory would generate product worth $140 million a year and EBITA net income of around $15 million.

There are old factories out there for sale too. Drywall maker Serious Materials has generated heaps of goodwill in recent months by revitalizing factories in Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Module manufacturing also only adds a portion of the overall cost of making a panel and doesn't require the same ornate capital equipment or processes as producing cells. If you analogize it to electronics, making cells is like producing chips while modules are PCs. If the cell costs are $1.80 a watt, the module costs are only 54 cents per watt.

Distributed manufacturing would also cut down transportation costs. Factories could be set up next to utility scale solar farms. No crating or shipping needed -- just truck the modules over on a fork lift. A factory next to the utility farm could churn out modules capable of producing a kilowatt of power.

In all, the plan could produce 3,000 jobs said Little. Will it be adopted? Who knows, but there's a good chance that local politicians will love it.

The Renault-Nissan Alliance (hereinafter "Nissan") has expanded its agreement with charging station maker ECOtality to bring charging stations for electric cars to Arizona. Earlier, the two companies outlined an agreement to try to put charging stations around Tucson.

Now, the two will work to put charging stations up on the Phoenix-Tucson corridor so people who own the cars, coming out next year, can voyage around the state. Nissan plans to bring all-electric cars to the U.S. and Japan in late 2010 that will cost between $20,000 and $33,000 before federal tax credits of $7,500. Check out the video of a test drive of the prototype here.

Who is missing from this deal? Better Place, the company that wants to build electric charging networks too. Nissan and Better Place are working on a similar project in Israel. It might be expanded, but there's no word yet.

One of the big differences between Better Place and ECOtality is that Better Place is working on ways to develop battery swapping stations so that drivers can get back on the road, in theory, in minutes. ECOtality doesn't support battery swaps.

Batteries in all-electric cars, after all, can weigh 400 to 1,000 pounds.

Although charging stations will inevitably become necessary as electric cars become more popular, most people will charge their cars at home and, if the utilities have any say in the matter, at night so that the cars won't stress the grid.