eIQ is one of many startups that have emerged in the last few years with an eye toward innovation in the photovoltaic inverter / balance of system market. The global inverter market is sizable and estimated at $2.4 billion in 2009.

The central inverter incumbents include SMA, SatCon, Fronius, Xantrex, PV Powered, and many more.

Here is a list of most of the startups chasing this market:

Rather than build the next central inverter, most of these firms are trying to distribute the electronics in the solar installation and they all have their own little twist on how they are performing that trick.

eIQ uses a DC-to-DC boost architecture that relies on parallel interconnection, ostensibly simplifying the design and reducing the amount of wire, combiner boxes and labor required to install a system. Like almost all of the firms on the list above – eIQ distributes the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) function and corrects for panel mismatch caused by shading, soling or degradation. This can yield significant more energy energy harvest, from 5 percent to 30 percent, depending on the enthusiasm of the marketing person pontificating.

I spoke with Michael Lamb, VP of Business Development and Gene Krzywinski the CTO of the firm.

The early stage startup, funded with $10 million from NGEN and Robert Bosch Venture Capital, already has some market traction – evidenced by its work with Signet Solar, an amorphous silicon panel vendor. "Signet is making a choice to bundle their products with ours because of the systems issues we address," said Krzywinski. 

The CTO continued: "We allow more Signet panels to be connected per bus – 75 Signet panels per DC bus (9 to 10 kilowatts per string) versus 4 to 5 kilowatts with other architectures," adding, "The others in the market control the current and eIQ works more in the voltage domain."

Pricing at small quantities is 40 cents per watt for the company's system alone. The customer does have to include a central inverter but the company claims that the savings that eIQ provides are in the Balance of System budget which includes wiring, combiner boxes, junction boxes, conduit and labor saying "That budget is bigger than the inverter budget – up to $1 per watt," said Krzywinski.

In addition to working with Signet, the firm has partnered with PV Powered.  There were First Solar panels in the demo room as well.

The bottom line according to Signet is that "eIQ helps the partner inverter become more efficient."

Oklahoma Gas & Electric on Tuesday named Silver Spring Networks and Greenbox Technology as partners on its smart grid plans – yet again.

Only this time, the utility plans to use the two for a full-scale deployment rather than a pilot project, as it did last year (see Smart Grid: Test Customers Give Thumbs Up).

And, of course, Silver Spring bought Greenbox last month, so the two will be working even more closely together, so to speak (see Silver Spring Swallows Greenbox).

The OG&E project announced Thursday calls for 42,000 smart meters from General Electric to be installed in Norman, Okla. Redwood City, Calif.-based Silver Spring will network the meters.

The project will also seek to recruit 2,000 to 3,000 customers to get "almost real time" information about their in-home energy use and electricity pricing.

That's similar to the pilot project Silver Spring and Greenbox did last year in Oklahoma City, and OG&E plans to use both technologies in their new project, Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring's vice president of markets, said Thursday.

The 42,000-meter deployment is part of a 771,000-smart meter rollout that OG&E just got $130 million in Department of Energy grant funding for on Tuesday (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Details of that broader deployment were awaiting state regulator approval of the utility's request to raise customer rates to recover the remaining costs of the project, which is expected to total about $300 million, the utility said Thursday.

With $3.4 billion in DOE grants announced Tuesday - enough to deploy 1.8 million smart meters, one million in-home energy displays, 175,000 load management devices, 170,000 smart thermostats, 200,000 advanced transformers and 700 automated substation systems over the course of the next three years or so – expect more of these announcements in the coming days.

Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati has launched a web portal primarily for investors and startups that tracks grants, loan guarantees and other financing mechanisms available at the state and local level.

As an added bonus, it also includes all of the grant awards. Thus, VCs and others can track who is applying for what and what sort of ideas they are proposing. The Small Business Innovation Research Program, for instance, has a $36 million fund for Phase I grants that top out at around $100,000. Phase II and II grants will follow. Applications are due by Nov. 20. Foro Energy, meanwhile, just got a $9.1 million grant to study geothermal drilling in ultra hard rock formations.

Is the information available elsewhere? Sure, but this cuts down search times. Did you want to apply for California state grants for natural gas innovations? Too late: It closed Oct. 27.

The site, which is based on Wilson's research and was set up with help from the Cleantech Group, breaks up the proposals into categories: green building, geothermal, etc. Check it out at Wilson's website.

Smart grid has been the buzzword on utility, entrepreneur and investor's lips in 2009. 

Funding the smart grid has certainly been on the Obama administration's agenda – as evidenced by the billions being funneled into this sector (see Jeff St. John's pieces about the winners and losers in this contest).

Venture Capital investors have been talking about smart grid investments for a while now. Foundation Capital's Steve Vassallo even authored a "Smart Grid Manifesto" to "help drive a single point of view across our four Smart Grid portfolio companies." Vassallo writes, "Smart Grid and smart pricing together answer the riddle of how you get market forces to make a difference in a monopoly environment." 

Foundation's smart grid investments include EnerNoc, Silver Spring Networks, eMeter and Control4.

Another theme amongst VC investors in 2009 has been the capital efficiency of smart grid plays. In other words: Don't expect too many Solyndra or Nanosolar-magnitude deals from the VC community in 2009 or 2010. 

That said, in looking at the numbers, although funding in smart grid is recovering:



It's a bit surprising to see the small proportion of smart grid deals relative to VC in greentech as a whole:



So are VCs talking and not diving in?  Are they looking to see the outcome of Silver Spring Networks' utility roll-out? Are we only in early days? 

Or will these initial forays into Advanced Meter Infrastructure and Home Energy Networks give way to a bigger and steadier wave of other smart grid technologies like Vehicle to Grid, EV charging stations, data management and analytics, network optimization tools, and independent energy storage operators?

The next few quarters will tell. Smart people in Greentech Media's smart grid practice see a new smart grid innovation and investment wave about to break.

PACE. It's gone from an obscure acronym in the green building market to a popular policy initiative championed by several states and Vice President Joe Biden in less than a year.

And now there's a VC-funded PACE startup.

NGEN Partners, Draper, Fisher Jurvetson and NewCycle Capital have invested in$12.2 million Renewable Funding, a startup founded by Cisco DeVries, who co-invented the PACE financing concept while the chief of staff for the mayor of Berkeley. UC Professor Dan Kammen is the other inventor. The company essentially helps a government establish a PACE program and administers them. DeVries acts as president.

PACE – or property assessed clean energy – loans for retrofitting homes and commercial buildings for energy efficiency differ from conventional loans in that the money gets paid back through supplemental property tax assessments. That small twist brings a host of benefits. The owner doesn't have to worry about losing the value of any retrofit if the home gets sold because the new owner assumes the payments. The payments, ideally, can also be lower than the amount saved on energy bills, making the retrofits free. Local communities also see job activity in the area. And moribund banks get to write loans.

Fourteen states including Florida, Texas and Maryland as well as 30 municipalities have already passed PACE programs. Berkeley, Calif. became the first governmental body to issue PACE bonds in January. The House and Senate included provisions inside their versions of Waxman-Markey that would permit the federal government to guarantee the bonds, which would enhance their marketability. Interest on PACE bonds right now aren't tax free.

Last week, Joe Biden made PACE loans a central part of his Recovery through Retrofit program unfurled last week.

There are major questions swirling around the company. Typically, consulting/services companies have trouble scaling. The universe of potential customers is likely also limited and closing a sale or engagement could take time. Still, if the federal government passes pending proposals to guarantee PACE bonds, the market could cause consumer demand to explode.

"With a federal guarantee it grow from a hundreds of millions to a $400 to $500 billion program," said Jack Hidary, one of the principals of PaceNow, a nonprofit geared to drumming up national support, earlier this month. (Hidary was also behind Cash for Clunkers.) "It can also help the 1.5 million people out of work in the construction industry."

Lost amidst all the excitement over President Barack Obama's announcement of $3.4 billion in Department of Energy smart grid grants on Tuesday, the federal government took a small step toward getting the nation's transmission grid up to speed.

That step was a memorandum of understanding between nine federal agencies to expedite the siting and building of transmission lines – mainly, the new lines that will be needed to bring renewable power from remote wind farms and solar plants to cities where it's needed - across federal lands.

The agencies – the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy and the Interior – said they'll establish a one-track system for handling environmental and administrative review of transmission proposals.

They also plan to help coordinate the same process at other federal, state and tribal agencies involved, according to a Wednesday announcement from FERC, which has called for more federal authority over transmission projects (see Green Light post).

Considering the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that proposed trans-state transmission projects have to navigate, making it simpler is no small task.

Even building new transmission lines within a state's borders can be difficult, as some proposed projects in California have found out (see California 'Green' Transmission Lines Could Cost $15.7B).

But the country is expected to need hundreds of billions of dollars of new transmission capacity if it wants to meet its renewable and clean energy goals (see Wind Growth Could Cost Eastern U.S. $80B in Transmission Lines).

New high-voltage power lines aren't the same stuff of dreams as smart meters, solar-powered cities and electric cars plugged into every garage. President Barack Obama gave the topic only two sentences in his Tuesday speech in Florida to announce the smart grid grants (see the Washington Post's transcript).

But for would-be transmission developers like ITC Holdings or Tres Amigas LLC, any steps, even on paper, to simplify their jobs would likely be welcomed (see Tres Amigas: Triple-Linking Transmission Grids).

HomePlug – the would-be hard-wired technology alternative to wireless networks for home energy management systems – just got a $4.9 million Department of Energy boost.

That's the value of the grant given to Intellon Corp. on Tuesday – one of a handful of grants from the DOE's $3.4 billion smart grid program given to a company that isn't a utility (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Intellon announced Wednesday it intends to match that grant with $4.9 million of its own to make an integrated circuit to match a new set of specifications coming out of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance.

The idea is to use a home's existing wiring to carry data between smart meters and the smart thermostats, smart appliances, smart energy displays and other gadgets envisioned for the home.

Those could work in tandem with or independently of wireless systems like ZigBee, but might be the best choice for places like apartments, where basement smart meters could be separated from apartments by yards of concrete, industry watchers say (see The Smart Home, Part I).

Intellon's new integrated circuit is intended to meet the requirements of HomePlug's "Green PHY" powerline communications specification expected to be finished later this year, the company announced Wednesday.

That new specification "modifies the industry-leading HomePlug AV powerline technology to create a lower data rate, lower power and lower cost smart grid solution," Intellon announced. In other words, HomePlug wants to make its technology cheaper and less power-hungry to meet utilities needs for an ultra-cheap solution for linking millions of customers homes (see Utilities Mull Price Points, Policies for Home Energy Management).

HomePlug has aligned its efforts with the ZigBee Alliance, another group that's seeking to popularize the low-power ZigBee wireless protocol to link up all those in-home energy management devices.

So far, ZigBee has had a lot of success in getting utilities to try it out, though WiFi, Z-Wave and other wireless technology providers are also working on that market (see More WiFi For Home Energy Controls and RF Mesh, ZigBee Top North American Utilities' Smart Meter Wish Lists).