Global Solar Gets New CEO

Global Solar Energy announced that Jeffrey Britt has been appointed its new CEO. He is replacing the retiring Michael Gering.

Gering, 73, will remain on the board of directors and serve as chairman, the Tucson company said Thursday.

Global Solar develops copper-indium-gallium-diselenide thin films, and has increasingly focused its resources on marketing its products to building material makers.

The flexible CIGS thin films will be embedded in roof shingles by Dow Chemical, which plans to launch the product next year.

The building material market is new for solar energy equipment manufacturers. Most of the solar panels on the market today are installed on top of the roof or on the ground.

Integrating solar cells into building materials presents technical challenges. Skeptics also question whether those materials would be affordable for the masses or become niche products.

Britt has been Global Solar's chief technology officer since 2005 and will keep that post, the company said. Britt joined the company in 1998.

Global Solar has a 40-megawatt factory in Tucson and a 35-megawatt factory in Germany. 

Walmart to Outfit New, Renovated Stores With LEDs. 650 Stores in First Year

Walmart, the mega-retailer that helped put energy consumption on the agenda for corporate executives, said it will use light emitting diode lights from Cree in new stores and retrofitted ones. In the first year, that will come to 650 stores alone.

The stores will replace ceramic metal halide lights, those honkers you see in the ceiling of big box retailers. The Cree bulbs will emit the same amount of light as a 70-watt bulb but use 82 percent less power.

LEDs have been talked about for years, but are finally going to start appearing in large numbers. Commercial establishments will install them first. The bulbs cut power, and commercial establishments typically have more bulbs, but the bulbs also cut maintenance. LED bulbs last 50,000 hours, far longer  than vacuum-tube bulbs. That leads to fewer hours the maintenance people have to climb ladders to replace bulbs, order new bulbs, figure out places to stock the ones that just came in the mail, etc.

LEDs will come to the consumer market, but more slowly. Most people, after all, just change their own bulbs so the cost associated with swapping them is minimal.

The quality of light has also improved with LED bulbs – that "alien autopsy" tone of white is vanishing – and the price is coming down. Need more on lighting? Here's a comprehensive report on the subject that, just by coincidence, I wrote.

In the middle of the decade Walmart started looking at its energy bills and determined that it could whack a lot of operating costs through efficiency. Lighting was an early target. By taking out the light bulbs in the coke machines on the premises, the company saved $1 million a year.

LEDs represent the biggest opportunity in lighting. The second biggest (or first, according to some) will be equipment to network lights so they can be automatically dimmed or turned off.

How Is Obama Doing With Climate Legislation?

So much for sick-outs.

The Environment and Public Works Committee of the U.S. Senate approved the Kerry-Boxer Bill by a vote to 11-1. Max Baucus, D-Mont., voted against it because he wants to see greenhouse gases capped at 17 percent below 2005 levels in 2020. The bill calls for a 20 percent reductions. The Republicans on the committee stayed home.

Other committees, however, want to vote on the bill so the full Senate may not vote on a bill until next year. That means President Obama will have to go to Copenhagen without a signed piece of legislation.

While that might be seen as a setback, the push on carbon legislation has been pretty interesting. Right after the inauguration, we talked to various policy makers and venture capitalists. Some said the complexities and conflicting interests meant that a carbon bill wouldn't become law until a second term. Washington analyst KC Mares said that the President might have to make the benefits more regional – i.e. let Michigan and industrial states keep more of the money from any cap and trade system – to make any bill politically palatable. Steve McBee, another Washington consultant, predicted that carbon legislation wouldn't pass this year but might make it before the 2010 elections.

The Kerry-Boxer bill and the companion Waxman-Markey aren't enacted yet, and they will face opposition, but overall progress seems to be on track.

Coulomb In Your Garage

SAN FRANCISCO -- Coulomb Technologies plans to launch a residential electric car charging device next year that is likely to cost between $500 and $1,000, said Praveen Mandal, president of Coulomb, at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

The Campbell, Calif.-based company currently sells charging equipment to businesses and utilities in North American and Europe and runs a subscription service for users to access these charging spots.

Getting into the home charging market is a logical next step, particularly given that major automakers such General Motors, Toyota and Nissan plan to start selling plug-in hybrid or all-electric cars in 2010.

Consumers could end up buying the chargers from car dealerships or even utilities, he added. The company hasn't finalized all the sales channels for the product launch, Mandal said.

Back in September, Coulomb said it had snagged a deal to sell its charging equipment at the smart USA dealers, which will be selling Daimler's smart fortwo electric cars.

Coulomb plans to sell the device somewhere between $500 and $1,000, depending on the options consumers choose, Mandal said. The device the company sells in the commercial market is around $2,500. 

Some of the options would allow users to decide how they want to schedule charging and check on electricity rates. A more sophisticated service would allow cars (with the proper equipment/software) to communicate with the charging device, for example. 

Consumers would be able to schedule charging over the Internet and get a text message if charging didn't start as planned, Mandal said. The device also could be connected to Coulomb's service center, which would be able to detect equipment failure and send a technician to fix it. 

You will need an electrician to install the device at home.

Oracle Does Microgrids, Too

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle, which already is making a big push into providing its software to support utility-wide smart grid projects, is also helping them manage smaller pieces of the smart grid puzzle.

Those are microgrids – neighborhood, campus or business-park sized pockets of renewable power, energy storage, demand response and grid-balancing systems that have been proposed as a way to integrate all the complicated pieces of a smart grid in manageable sizes.

Oracle has taken its enterprise software expertise to that scale, working with a southern California utility on such a microgrid project, Linda Jackman, vice president of product management for Oracle's utilities division, said Wednesday at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco.

While Jackman didn't identify the utility or project in question, her description of the project – in a southern California community with a fairly slender connection to the larger grid of the utility in question – could be describing Borrego Springs, Calif.

That's where San Diego Gas & Electric has been working on a microgrid project funded with about $3 million from the California Energy Commission and a $7 million grant from the Department of Energy. That DOE funding is from previous years, rather than part of the $3.4 billion in DOE smart grid stimulus grants announced last week.

SDG&E is seeking $100 million from a smaller, $615 million pool of DOE grants aimed at smaller, more experimental smart grid projects to do a second microgrid project at the University of California at San Diego.

Named partners on that proposal include SAIC, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Cisco, General Electric, and Balance Energy, a newly launched arm of defense contractor BAE Systems (see Balance Energy Wants to Build Microgrids, Starting With San Diego).

Oracle is not on that list. But it, like the partners that want to work with SDG&E, may see microgrids as a promising market. That's the view of Pike Research, which believes microgrids will grow to a $2.1 billion market by 2015 with $7.8 billion invested in such systems over that time (see Microgrids: $2.1B Market by 2015).

By the way, the term "microgrid" could refer to a utility-controlled entity (which can also go by the term "virtual power plant"), or one owned by an independent entity, like a college campus or corporation, that sells the power and grid stability it could generate back to the utility.

GTM’s Networked Grid Event Packs the House

SAN FRANCISCO -- Smart Grid is the energy theme of the moment – hundreds of millions of government funding, billion dollar smart meter deployments, and hundreds of millions in venture capital have drawn the attention of entrepreneurs, utilities, and corporate behemoths like Cisco, Intel, Oracle, ABB and Silver Spring.

And almost 500 of these smart grid cognoscenti converged at the PG&E Auditorium in San Francisco to assess the state of this nascent many-faceted industry at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid event.

Rick Thompson, GTM's fearless smart grid leader, kicked off the event with a review of some recent industry polling. Here are a few tidbits:

• Utilities view the benefits of the smart grid as a reduction in peak demand, energy efficiency, and an increased visibility and control.
• As for energy storage, utilities are planning to deploy pilot energy storage systems but there remains lots of uncertainty in storage and many smart grid areas.
• The major concerns for the utilities are back-end management and data management (clearly an opportunity for startups) as well as regulatory issues.

David J. Leeds, GTM's smart grid analyst, introduced the Real World Deployments and Policies: 2010 to 2020 panel. What follows are some of the more interesting quotes from the speakers.

Thomas Bialek, Chief Engineer, Smart Grid SDG&E:

• "Smart grid is not a revolution, it's evolution."
• "In California, we've been very progressive in our utility networks and smart grid is just a furtherance of those activities."
• "Will the utilities be the gas station of the future?"

Erfan Ibrahim, EPRI:

• "The rumor is that the grid is antiquated – that rumor is coming out of Silicon Valley and it's not true."
• Our grid has already been made intelligent "the challenge is we don't have a way of internetworking these nodes, we need a cost effective way of interconnecting already intelligent sensors."
• On cybersecurity: "We need more than just a big wall, we need successive challenges to the hacker. Think of grid cybersecurity in a systemic way. It's sophisticated and needs to be done with diligence."
• "Pool pumps, water heaters, AC and thermostats are the items that utilities would like to control in order to tackle peak demand."
• Amongst the many critical issues with the smart grid are: "Who owns the data and who has the right to use the data collected by the smart grid?"

Andrew Campbell, Senior Energy Advisor, CPUC:

• The biggest challenge in the smart grid is considered the regulatory aspect, at least in the eyes of the utilities.
• PG&E, SDG&E, and SCE will deploy 12 million advanced electric meters and five million gas meters by the end of 2012. (That's almost 15,000 meters a day!)
• There is no specific smart grid related regulatory framework for these deployments.

Kevin Dasso, Senior Director, Smart Grid Strategy at PG&E:

• "What does PG&E think of when we think smart grid? The simple explanation: An overlay of intelligence and automation over the existing grid – wires and substations – to offer new services and features. It can enable new services and features – uptake of renewables, bill management, and reliability."
• "There is a lot of excitement but excitement can be fleeting – we need to strike while the iron is hot. There will be some kind of half-life – so strike now."
• "Build customer awareness and expectations early. Plugging in a smart meter doesn't automatically reduce a customer's bill."
• Standards and roadmaps can make or break the success of the smart grid. Smart grid is a journey and we really need a roadmap to guide that journey."
• "There will be features ten years from now that we have no idea that could be done."