Japanese corporate giants such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo are aiming to capture a growing share of the business of providing clean water in an increasingly thirsty world – a business that some estimate could reach $1 trillion by 2025.

The news comes from Reuters, which on Friday cited executives at Japan's largest trading houses staking big claims in the expanding market for drinking water filtration, wastewater treatment and other water technologies and services.

For example, Sumitomo Corp. plans a tenfold growth in its drinking water and wastewater treatment business portfolio by 2020, up to 10 million customers from today's 1.3 million, company director Takahiro Moriyama told Reuters.

Trading house Marubeni plans to expand its water business customer base fivefold to 10 million over the next few years, and it and fellow giants such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi have been taking big stakes in water projects in countries from China, the Phillipines and Australia to the Middle East and Latin America, Reuters reported.

Welcome to the water world. The push by Japanese giants follows big new water investments from such international corporate giants as IBM, General Electric and Siemens, which have been applying cash and technological expertise to the field (see Green Light posts here and here and this Bloomberg article for some examples).

Those companies, in turn, are challenging longstanding water industry leaders such as France's Suez and Veolia, as the Reuters story noted. At the same time, a host of startups are bringing new filtration, purification and desalination technologies to market, along with systems to measure and manage the transport and use of water for farms, homes and industry (see Water Purification for the Masses? and A Guide to the Water World).

Companies like Sony have their own stake in clean water, Reuters noted – Sony has had to turn to Asahi Kasei group to provide clean water for its factories making circuit boards in central China, after it found itself unable to work with impure water at the site.

Industry's need for clean water could be one of the more lucrative places to start in the water industry, as Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit Pacific Institute, pointed out in a presentation to greentech investors earlier this year (see 'Peak Water' Requires Low-Cost Solutions).

That's because much of the world's water for homes and farms -– the latter making up the lion's share of global fresh water use – is still priced too cheaply to make large-scale high-tech investment cost effective, he said.

Projects aimed at privatizing public water supply systems also have met backlashes in some countries where they've been implemented. Only about 5 percent of the world's water market has been privatized, Reuters reported.

R. Dixon Thayer, who has run a variety of companies, will take over for Frank Greco as CEO of Southwest Windpower. The tranisition occurs Dec. 8.

Southwest is one of the leaders in the small, but maybe finally growing, market for small wind turbines. Southwest specializes in turbines that can generate approximately one to three kilowatts, but are small enough to put on residences or small industrial buildings. The company claims that the turbines can provide 40 percent to 90 percent of a home's power, depending on electricity use, the number of turbines, and the quality of the prevailing winds (see Small Wind Spreading Its Wings).

General Electric joined a group of investors and put $10 million into the company in April.

Small wind has often been the crazy uncle of greentech: a nice idea, but impractical compared to passive systems like solar panels. A study by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust found that at 21 sites, the projected power output was three times the actual power output. A green retrofitting contractor who installs small wind turbines recently described small turbines to us as "eye candy."

Nonetheless, the technology has slowly and steadily improved. The Massachusetts study noted that it wasn't the turbines that were at fault. It was how they were implemented. Southwest's sales have been growing rapidly, thanks in part to tax incentives. Other companies such as Makani Power and Magenn have recently entered the market.

Like green window specialist Sage Electrochromics, Southwest is a new name to a lot of people, but it is not startup. It began approximately 23 years ago.

Sometimes older is better.

Although Toshiba and others have promoted fast breeder reactors for the nuclear industry and still other companies have promoted things like small, modular nuclear reactors, the quickest, most efficient way to add nuclear capacity lay in concentrating on light water reactors, according to Ernie Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative during a visit to San Francisco this week.

"For the next decades, it is light water reactors," he said. "The key question for the U.S. is getting them built."

Why? "We know how to build them," he added. Hyman Rickover developed the first light water reactors in the 1950s and variants of light water reactors constitute the majority of reactors around the world. The "light" in light water reactors refers to the fact that plain water, versus oxygen combined with deuterium (the heavier isotope of hydrogen), serves as a coolant.

Fast breeder reactors were developed with the idea that uranium and nuclear fuel would be in short supply. "It turns out that that pathway was based on assumptions that aren't relevant," he added.

Fusion? Not in our lifetimes, he stated after eyeballing me. (I'm a youthful 48.) He then added that that meant not likely before 2050. The Energy Initiative is MIT's multimillion dollar push into developing technologies and companies around solar, energy storage and other fields. Hence, his opinion carries weight.

While there are no nuclear power plants under construction at the moment in the U.S. many believe that nuclear will play a larger role in the future. Energy secretary Steve Chu has come out in favor of expanding nuclear. Several European nations are also looking at nuclear. The U.S. has also changed the approval process (reactor designs can be certified by the manufacturer separately from the site approval).

"I don't see a sensible solution [toward reducing carbon emissions] without having nuclear as part of the mix," said Dan Kammen, the UC Berkeley professor who also runs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at the school. Nuclear power plants can gobble up billions in capital and take years to build, but they also can act as a very low-carbon source of energy for decades. The carbon comes from the energy expended to build them.

Nonetheless, many, including Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins, argue that nuclear, with its chronic cost overruns, delays and waste issues, isn't nearly as economical as advocates claim.

Big smart meter maker Elster Group has announced a new CEO – Simon Berensford-Wylie, the former CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks.

Perhaps the move will lead to new partnerships between the two companies. German company Elster has been seeing rapid growth in smart meter deployments, along with its big rivals Itron, Landis+Gyr, General Electric and Sensus, and also makes gear to manage other parts of the so-called "smart grid" (see Green Light post).

Elster has deployed six million smart meters and other devices around the world, and reported revenues of €1.3 billion ($1.9 billion) in 2008, compared to 2008 revenues of $1.25 billion for its main smart metering rival in Europe, Swiss-based Landis+Gyr (see Landis+Gyr Raises $100M).

Nokia Siemens Networks, on the other hand, has been ailing of late. The joint venture of Nokia and Siemens announced earlier this month that it would seek to lay off about 5, 670 employees in a second round of job cuts amidst tough price competition in the global networking market (see Bloomberg).

But smart grid communications – such as networks that link smart meters with utilities – are seen as a growth area for telecommunications and networking giants the world over.

The $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants given out by the Department of Energy last month is expected to lead to 18 million smart meters installed in the next three years (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

And the European Union has set a 2022 deadline for every electrical meter to have some kind of two-way communications and control capability (see Green Light post).

A number of executives from utility, networking and energy giants have taken executive positions in smart grid startups such as Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant and GridPoint in recent months (see Green Light post).

The world will have 250 million smart meters by 2015, representing a $3.9 billion market, according to a report from Pike Research released Monday.

But that growth – representing $19.5 billion in new meters installed, and an increase from about 46 million smart meters installed worldwide last year – will be uneven, according to Pike's executive summary of the report.

North America, which is set to overtake Europe as the fastest-growing smart meter market next year, will see smart meters make up 55 percent of its installed meter base by 2015, for example, while worldwide penetration of smart meters will be 18 percent by that time, Clint Wheelock, managing director, said in a news release.

The report also differentiates between "basic" smart meters capable of two-way communication of electricity consumption data, and "advanced" meters that can be remotely disconnected and, more importantly, enable so-called home area networks, or energy management systems within homes and businesses (see The Smart Home, Part I and The Smart Home, Part II).

Pike's report also noted that the big expansion in smart metering won't last forever. Government financial support - including the Department of Energy's awarding of $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants last week - has broken utilities' traditional 15 to 20 year meter replacement cycle, Wheelock noted (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Pike's report matches the views of other industry observers, who say smart meter makers like General Electric, Itron, Landis+Gyr, Sensus and Elster – as well as the companies such as Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant, SmartSynch, Grid Net and others seeking to provide networking and communications for those smart meters – are vying to establish their technologies in this big new round of deployments (see 8.3M Smart Meters and Counting in U.S.).

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.

For every one project that got a piece of $3.4 billion in Department of Energy stimulus grants on Tuesday, three projects didn't.

But while the 100 winning projects may have won on the technical merits, that doesn't mean the 300 that didn't make the cut are lacking in quality, DOE advisor Matt Rogers said in announcing the awards (see DOE's $3.43B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Still, utilities with projects that didn't make Tuesday's list are likely weighing their options for how – or if – to continue without DOE funding.

Several utilities had asked for extra money to speed up ongoing smart grid projects. Those will likely continue, if not as fast as they could have.

Dominion Virginia Power, for example, didn't get $200 million to speed up its deployment of 2.4 million smart meters, and Austin Energy missed out on the $113 million it was seeking to help support its $230 million plan to build out smart grid systems across its service area (see Grant Watch: Austin Energy, Oncor Seek Millions More for Smart Grid).

Some utilities filed multiple requests that added up to more than the $200 million maximum. Some of those got only partial funding.

Atlanta-based Southern Co., for example, only got $164 million of the $362 million it had sought (see Green Light post). Pepco won $149 million, but had asked for $254 million (see Baltimore Business Journal).

Texas-based Oncor, which had sought a total of $317 million in three applications to support both smart meter and distribution grid automation projects, didn't get any grant funding (see Oncor Makes $317M Smart Grid Stimulus Pitch).

Other projects that didn't get grants haven't started yet, but were part of utilities' longer-range plans. Whether or not they can go forward or will have to be scaled back or shelved will depend on many factors, including how much funding they've already secured versus how much they'll have to ask state regulators to approve via customer rate hikes.

Pacific Gas & Electric, for example, didn't get the $42.5 million it had sought to boost its plan to deploy energy management devices to about 75,000 small businesses and homes in San Jose, Calif. (see PG&E Asks Cisco to Help Make 75K Businesses Energy Wise).

Still, the utility will move forward with a smaller-scale project with funding already approved as part of its $2.2 billion, 10 million smart meter deployment, PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno said Tuesday.

Other proposals that weren't on Tuesday's winners list include:

• Connecticut-based Northeast Utilities, which had sought grants of about $126.5 million, or up to half the cost of its $253 million smart grant plan.
• National Grid, a U.K.-based company with operations in the United States, had asked for $200 million for a smart grid program for about 200,000 customers in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
• St. Louis, Miss.-based Ameren Corp. has sought $185 million for two of its subsidiary utilities in Missouri and Illinois.
• Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison had asked for $175 million to boost its 141,000 smart meter deployment (see Green Light post).
• The Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago (BOMA Chicago) had wanted $93 million to create a "virtual generator" out of 260 office buildings linked for energy control (see BOMA Chicago's $93M Smart Grid Stimulus Pitch).