Viewing posts tagged "Smart Grid"

Michael Kanellos 06 08 09, 11:55 AM

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Silver Spring Steals Exec From Cisco

Silver Spring Networks has nabbed a somewhat high-level executive from Cisco Systems, according to sources. We understand it is not a technical exec, but still an interesting tidbit in the looming conflict between these two companies.  The announcement is expected soon.

To recap the drama: Silver Spring makes technology for allowing meters to communicate to utilities. The heart of the company's technology is a networking card. It can be fit into a meter or into equipment at a utility station. The company has signed a massive contract with PG&E to install millions of meters in California. It has been one of the most successful companies in raising VC funds over the past two years.

Cisco, of course, is the king of IT networking and earlier this year unfurled its strategy to get into the energy management and smart grid markets. Cisco will start by controlling power in phones and networking equipment with its GridWise software platform, but will ultimately move into controlling power in buildings.  Both companies are working with Florida Light and Power on a million meter project in Miami. Cisco bought Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence in January and more are expected (I predict Verdiem will be one of the next it will buy).

Although the two could become allies, they also seem to be shaping up to be competitors. Should be an interesting show.

Jeff St. John 06 05 09, 3:48 PM

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Japanese Consortium to Build Smart Grid Project in New Mexico?

A consortium of Japanese companies that may include Hitachi, Toshiba, Fuji and Panasonic have set their sights on building a smart grid project in an unnamed New Mexico town, according to news reports Friday.

Details on the plan, which emerged Friday from the Nikkei news service (via Green Car Congress), are sketchy. The project, planned for an unnamed New Mexico town with about 1,000 families, is meant to get underway in October, the report said.

The initial cost of the project – 2 billion to 3 billion yen, or $20 million to $30 million, according to reports – is to be covered by the Japanese government and is expected to include battery-based energy storage and solar power systems, the report said. 

The project is to be led by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, a Japanese government group, the report said. While that group will seek bidders on the project, the report said that they will likely include Hitachi, Toshiba, Fuji Electric Holdings Co., Panasonic Corp. and general contractor Shimizu Corp., which were also involved in a U.S.-Japan research project earlier this year.

Michael Kanellos 06 04 09, 11:00 AM

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GE Gives Its Energy Storage Outline

Everyone wants to sell technology to GE. Luckily, Kevin Skillern, who runs the VC unit inside GE's Energy Financial Services Group, explained how the behemoth breaks down the energy storage market.

The first tier belongs to devices, such as flywheels, that can store power for a few milliseconds and up to 15 seconds. These devices exist to keep equipment in power plants safe from disturbances and fluctuations.

The second tier of devices can hold power for five to 30 minutes and mostly exist to keep the grid stable. The frequency stays the same despite the load. Examples of this kind of technology would be banks of lithium-ion batteries. GE has invested in A123 Systems, which is testing out lithium-ion battery packs at utilities. "We are seeing stuff on the cusp of being economically sensible," he said.

The third class, panacea storage, could "shift power from day to night," he said. With this kind of storage, power produced by wind farms in Texas at 3:00 a.m. could be stored until the morning. The company is somewhat "bearish in the near term," he said. "The technologies are still five to 10 times too expensive."

But progress is coming. GE, after all, announced it would invest at least $100 million into a factory in New York to make sodium batteries, which can do persistent storage. GE's first sodium batteries, coming in 2010, will go into trains, but they could also be used at wind or solar farms.

As for smart grid, Skillern was quite upbeat. In the U.S., power costs around 9 cents per kilowatt hour on average. In Europe, it's around 22 cents. Some smart grid applications have the potential to bring it down, in some circumstances, to three to nine cents, he said. If an energy services company offered to handle your lights for 12 cents a kilowatt hour (nine cents for power, three cents for their fee) companies would do it.

Michael Kanellos 06 04 09, 12:05 AM

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How to Win a Contract with a Utility

If you are a smart grid company trying to land a contract or trial with a major utility, Daniel Weiss of the Angeleno Group has two words of advice.

Be Big.

Bonus piece of advice: Have a large, existing revenue stream.

Utilities are notoriously conservative, he told an audience at the Smart Grid Innovation Symposium sponsored by Innovation Center Denmark (in Menlo Park, Calif., of all places). The paramount concern of a utility is reliability. It outweighs considerations about cost, technology, innovation or other performance metrics. Thus, they really prefer dealing with established, old-line companies.

An exec who runs the advanced metering program at a publicly owned utility "referred to a publicly traded billion dollar company as 'a very small company that we are reluctant to do business with,'" Weiss recalled.

"You can imagine the perspective when they look at a company who has done $20, $30, $50 million in venture financing," he added.

Maybe there's no Moore's Law in grid either.

Jeff St. John 06 03 09, 2:31 PM

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How Not to Get Utilities to Pay for Home Energy Data

All those home energy management startups promising to tell you exactly how much electricity your toaster, TV and fridge are using better come up with a business plan that doesn't rely heavily on utilities paying for it.

Oh sure, utilities will pay to know a household's overall energy usage – that's part of the reason they're deploying millions of smart meters around the world. They'll want that information to do demand response programs, better integrate rooftop solar panel and other distributed power generation systems into the grid and other pieces of what's known as the "smart grid" (see The Smart Home, Part I)

But as far as the utility executives at Wednesday's Smart Grid Innovation Symposium in Palo Alto were concerned, asking utilities to pay for more data than what they need for those moneymaking or cost-saving purposes is a nonstarter.

"Do we really need to measure the throughput of a toaster? Probably not," said Ed Kjaes, Southern California Edison's director of electric transportation. "This issue of how much data is useful, and how much gets in the way, is part of the debate right now."

And he's got a simple calculation for it – of all the data likely to be generated by in-home energy monitoring systems, "80 percent of it we're not going to need," he said.

Andrew Tang, senior director of Smart Energy Web for Pacific Gas & Electric, agreed with that assessment. The problem, he said, is that utilities need to make money from data if they're going to spend money on handling it.

"More granular data... if I don't need it for system reliability and I can't monetize it, why would I want to buy it?" he said.

This kind of response is no doubt what worries entrepreneurs interested in bringing new home energy monitoring technologies to market.

Many makers of such systems - Tendril Networks, Energate, Aztech Associates, Onzo, Greenbox and others - are conducting trials with utilities.

But others are considering ways to sidestep utilities to bring their products to consumers (see Will Utilities or Customers Lead in Smart Grid?)

Going that route, however, will require the startups in question to justify the cost of their systems in terms of homeowners' power bill savings, Tang said.

PG&E does care about measuring some of the biggest household energy loads, he noted, such as thermostats to control the air conditioner loads that are up to half of the utility's peak summer afternoon demand.

Electric or plug-in hybrid cars will also need to be monitored and controlled when they start arriving in neighborhood garages in large numbers, he added. And distributed power generation systems like rooftop solar, as well as distributed electricity storage systems like batteries, will need to be linked with the utility, he said.

But there's a cost to handling that data. Beyond the simple challenge of analyzing and storing the vast amounts of it that will come from such things as 15-minute smart meter reads, there's also the question of privacy and security, Kjaes noted.

Providing that security adds costs to data management, particularly as utilities come under new federal guidelines for securing it.

That's not just the view of U.S. utilities. Klaus Baggesen Hilger, senior innovation manager for Dong Energy, noted that he'd be interested in paying for data that can help the Danish utility model "narrow parts of the distribution network" to see where it needs to focus future investments.

Beyond that, however, "I don't see a big market for it," he said.

Eric Wesoff 05 20 09, 10:22 AM

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Top 12 Greenest Cities in the U.S.

All politics are local. So is the progress in greentech.

Federal and state Renewable Portfolio Standards, federal loans and stimulus packages are vitally important programs.

But progress in greening our cities is going to come from local efforts as much as from on high. We take a quick look at some city-based green initiatives.

San Jose, Calif. considers itself the capital of Silicon Valley, and wants to be the global center of greentech innovation. The city and its Mayor, Chuck Reed, have initiated one of the nation's most aggressive green initiatives – the Green Vision program with a 15-year goal that includes:

1. Creating 25,000 cleantech jobs

2. Reducing per capita energy use by 50 percent

3. Receiving 100 percent of its electrical power from clean renewable sources

4. Building or retrofitting 50 million square feet of green buildings

5. Diverting 100 percent of waste from landfills

6. Recycling or reusing 100 percent of its wastewater (100 million gallons per day)

7. Ensuring that 100 percent of its public fleet vehicles run on alternative fuels

8. Planting 100,000 new trees

9. Replacing 100 percent of its streetlights with smart, zero emission lighting

San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley but Palo Alto, Calif. could arguably assume the mantle of its' heart (against the protestations of Mountain View and Menlo Park). Palo Alto is the home of Stanford University, Packard's garage (of Hewlett Packard fame), Facebook, and a lot of Venture Capital firms. Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page of Google call it home.

Palo Alto can also lay claim to be one of the nation's greenest cities.

In June 2008, Palo Alto adopted mandatory green-building requirements for residential and commercial development -- one of the most stringent green building ordinances in the nation.

New buildings and remodels in Palo Alto must meet standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council or the Build It Green organization. Expect some public pushback since the green requirements can add from $2,000 to $10,000 to the cost of a home and 2 percent to 5 percent to the cost of a commercial project, according to a city report.

Palo Alto also has

• A climate protection plan addressing CO2 emissions and water
• A program for less-toxic pest control
• Proposed stringent ordinances on construction and demolition debris, a major source of landfill material, waste, and toxics.
• The "greenest" congressional office. Anna Eshoo, a high-powered Congressperson, recently unveiled the very first congressional office in the nation to go maximum green. Eshoo's office has installed a 1.6 kilowatts photovoltaic system and 100 percent of the electricity used by the office is obtained from renewable sources. The office has made profound green modifications to its' lighting, water, heating, cooling, materials, waste stream and the transit habits of its' employees.

Palo Alto has some competition from its neighbor/rival across the Bay – the Republic of Berkeley, Calif. 

Late last year, Berkeley's city council approved a plan to offer city-backed loans to building owners who install PV systems. The loans, up to $20,000 each, would be paid off as part of the owners' property-tax bills. This type of program could eliminate the biggest obstacle to solar deployments – the large upfront cost.

If this program succeeds, it could be expanded to finance other energy-efficiency efforts such as installing double-glazed windows or thermal insulation.

How about tiny Greensburg, Kan.? After being decimated by an F-5 tornado that leveled the city and left few homes standing, the survivors launched a plan to resurrect their town as the greenest city in America. All public buildings are to conform to LEED platinum standards.

Now, two years after the disaster, Greensburg's new homes are almost 50 percent more energy-efficient due to energy-saving windows, improved insulation, efficient heating, etc.

The people of Greensburg are pioneering the greening of a municipality, in one of the reddest states, no less.

Gainesville, Fla. is the first U.S. city with Feed-in-Tariffs.

In the first such program in the country, The Gainesville City Commission has approved a solar feed-in tariff for residential and business customers served by the Gainesville Regional Utilities in Florida. Wrote Ucilia Wang:

"Under the program, owners of solar energy systems would sell the electricity to the utilities at $0.32 per kilowatt-hour under a 20-year contract. The rate, which is higher than the price for conventional power, will remain for the first two years of the program. ... The program is modeled after the successful one in Germany, which has become the largest solar market in the world."

Other cities with claims on "the greenest" include:

Austin, Texas: Austin Energy, the city's municipally owned utility, plans to grow the renewables' portion of Austin's energy portfolio to 30 percent by 2020 and to build solar power's share to 100MW by 2020.

Boulder, Colo.: The city has resolved to become a zero-waste community.

Burlington, Vt.: More than one-third of energy used in the city comes from renewable resources, an impressive figure for the frosty Northeast.

Madison, Wis.: A bike-friendly city with an extensive recycling program that claims more than 90 percent participation.

New York City: High-density populations like NYC use fewer resources per capita. New Yorkers use of public transport dwarfs that of any other city.

Portland, Ore.: Portland is bike friendly, has set an urban growth limit to protect 25 million acres of open space, and recycles more than half of the city's trash.

San Francisco: More than half the city's residents use public or alternative transportation to get to work.

Please forgive the slightly California-centric selection in this list. Feel free to comment and let us know your choice for greenest city.