Jeff St. John 09 16 09, 12:32 PM

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Lawsuits Coming Over DOE’s Choice of Smart Grid Stimulus Winners?

The hand that giveth may also be the hand that gets slapped with lawsuits.

That's the view of Frank Ramirez, CEO of Ice Energy. He believes that the Department of Energy might face a rash of lawsuits in the coming months over the applications it approves – and denies – for stimulus grants for smart grid projects.

That's because the "well-meaning bureaucrats" at DOE have been asked to pick winners and losers among the hosts of different technologies behind the billions of dollars in grant-seeking smart grid projects, Ramirez said Wednesday at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito.

And that means that "the number of lawsuits that will be coming when those announcements are made will be stunning," he said.

DOE is expected to start announcing in mid-October the first round of winners for its $3.9 billion pool of smart grid grants. The amount of money being requested far exceeds the amount available, based on a tally of publicly announced applications (see Green Light post).

The stimulus program has already slowed down smart grid projects, as utilities wait to hear if they can get federal funding before moving forward, said Cree Edwards, CEO of meter data management and home energy software maker eMeter (see Green Light post).

"The U.S. has come to a screaming halt," he said.

But the stimulus hasn't been all that bad, said Adrian Tuck, CEO of home energy management software and device maker Tendril Networks. He said his company has talked to about 50 utilities that weren't planning smart grid projects until the stimulus program came into being.

"We'll know in the next six weeks, I think, the first tranche of winners and losers," he said.