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."

Cambrios Raises $14.5M

Cambrios Technologies, a developer of transparent conductive film for thin-film solar panels, has raised $14.5 million.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the D round came from its existing investors such as Arch Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Oxford Bioscience Partners.

Three companies that Cambrios does business with – Sumitomo, Chisso and Nissha Printing – also put in some money, Cambrios said Wednesday.

Cambrios is a nanotech startup whose first product, called ClearOhm, is a coating material that can be used for making liquid-crystal display screens, light-emitting diodes and solar thin films. The company's key customers are mostly in the consumer electronics industry at the moment.

Cambrios develops products for Chisso to make LCD panels, for example. Cambrios has a development agreement with Nissha to use ClearOhm for making touch screens.

In solar, a transparent conductive oxide, such a zinc oxide or indium-tin oxide, is layered on solar cells to act as electrodes. Cambrios said its coating could replace those more common oxides to boost performance.

eMeter to Manage Smart Meters for Vattenfall

eMeter has gotten another toehold in Europe, this time with Vattenfall to manage a smart meter network for the utility's 360,000 customers in Finland, the companies announced Tuesday.

It's not a huge number, compared to the 24 million smart meters eMeter already helps manage in North America and Australia (see eMeter Lands $32M for Smart Meter Data, Home Energy Software).  

But if the Swedish-based energy giant likes what the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup does in Finland, it has about 6 million more customers across northern Europe who will need smart meter soon, Chris King, eMeter chief strategy officer, said Tuesday.

eMeter doesn't provide communications for smart meters. Rather, it provides the back-end meter data management (MDM) software to handle tasks like reporting outages, turning meters on and off, and the all-important customer billing process - along with all the data storage that entails.

This isn't eMeter's first European project. It is doing a 100,000 smart meter deployment with Umetriq, a subsidiary of Berlin Gaswerke, which could grow to several million meters, King said That project would appear to be linked to eMeter's partnership with Siemens (see Green Light post).

eMeter also is working with Electralink, a company vying to be a central data repository and for the United Kingdom's plan to have 26 million smart meters in place by 2020 (see Green Light post).

The European Union has set a 2022 deadline for every electrical meter to have some kind of two-way communications and control capability, and utilities are lining up partners to get the job done (see Iberdrola Looks to PRIME PLC Standard).

Some are ahead of the game. Italy's Enel has about 30 million meters installed at almost all its customers. It uses the utility's own proprietary system based on technology from San Jose, Calif.-based Echelon, a company that has millions of meters using its own system under contract throughout Europe (see Echelon Expands Euro Smart Meter Biz).

Other utilities are planning smart meter networks, and Europe is in fact more heavily smart-metered than the United States. But eMeter offers some functions most European smart meter networks now lack, King said.

"There are a lot of smart meters installed in Europe, but implementing those systems, they implemented the minimal connections between the AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) systems and the billing systems," he said. "They've done no dynamic pricing, no demand response, no customer presentment of data."

Emeter can do that, he said. It even has its own Web interface for homeowners to watch their day-to-day energy use, a step that studies show can help customers cut about 10 percent from their power bills – though Vattenfall hasn't yet said what it plans along those lines, King said.

It's true that Enel hasn't done much on the home networking front, though its smart meters have more than paid themselves off by giving the utility information to correct voltages, predict equipment failures and fix other money-wasting distribution grid problems, Echelon CTO Bob Dolin said (see Notes From a National Smart Grid Experiment).

Enel is looking to test out a customer-facing home energy portal, one that may include Google's free PowerMeter energy dashboard, according to a September presentation by Enel executive Livio Gallo (see Enel Considering Google's PowerMeter for Pilot Project).

eMeter certainly has competition for the job, and not just from other startups. Smart meter companies make their own meter data management software, and heavyweights like IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have been doing a lot of smart grid work that could intrude on the same market (see Microsoft to Play Utility Matchmaker, Oracle Launches 'End-to-End' Smart Grid Software and Integrating the Smart Meter Universe).

In Europe, Spanish company Telvent has seen its fair share of smart grid integration work. As for Europe's smart meters themselves, Landis+Gyr holds a large slice of the market, analysts say.

422.7M Gallons of Seawater Desalinated a Day

Energy Recovery, the Oakland, Calif.-based maker of advanced desalination equipment, has signed a contract to install its PX Pressure Exchanger systems in a new desalination plant in Tenes, Algeria. The plant itself will generate 52.8 million gallons of fresh water a day and marks the tenth project in the country for Energy Recovery. In all, those plants generate 422.7 million gallons a day.

And San Diego is trying to build one. There's American ingenuity for you.

Energy Recovery in a lot of ways can be considered the iconoclast of desalination. Reverse osmosis desalination is effectively an energy-intensive pressure play: Water gets forced through a fine membrane that removes seawater. Energy Recovery's machines do not remove salt. Instead, they harness the pressure in the wastewater stream that flows from reverse osmosis systems and then feed it to the pressurizing machines at the front of the process, thereby lowering the total energy required.

Exploiting this pressure drastically reduces the amount of energy required to purify water, which in turn lowers the cost. Energy costs have been the Achilles' heel of desalination.

It took around 20 kilowatt hours per cubic meter to desalinate water with traditional multi-stage systems. Reverse osmosis membranes dropped that to 8 kilowatts to 10 kilowatt hours per cubic meter.

Putting a turbine in the waste stream and turning the pressure into waste stream drops it to 5 kilowatts to 6 kilowatts per cubic meter.

Energy Recovery's pressure harvesting technique drops it to 2 kilowatts per cubic meter. The system is also 97 percent efficient on average.

The company also had one of the few IPOs last year.

Dell, NEI Team Up on Servers for DC-Powered Data Centers

Dell is getting a new line of servers ready for the coming world of DC-powered data centers.

Dell will work with NEI to manufacture and market the servers, based on Dell's PowerEdge R710 platform, the two companies announced Tuesday. The move puts Dell alongside competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems that now have DC-powered servers on the market.

Electricity grids deliver power in alternating current, or AC. But servers and other computer equipment use direct current, or DC. Converting AC to DC is mostly done with power converters for each individual device or server rack.

But powering an entire data center with DC power could save the inefficiencies associated with this method, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That includes reducing the inefficiencies in converting incoming grid AC to DC, and then back again, several times to filter out grid power glitches, which many data centers do (see DC For Data Centers?)

"You get much more efficient power usage by making them DC across the board," said Jeff Hudgins, NEI's vice president of marketing. "It's a growing trend."

The telecommunication industry has used central DC power for some time, he added. Japan's NTT DoCoMo unveiled a DC-powered data center in February, one it said could cut energy use significantly, with a goal of a 50 percent reduction in associated greenhouse-gas emissions (see NTT DoCoMo Tests DC-Powered Data Center).

Consider it one of many ways data centers are trying to squeeze energy efficiency out of their operations. Data centers consume about 1.5 percent of the electricity in the United States, but that use is set to double by 2012, requiring the equivalent of 10 new power plants, according to an EPA study (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis').

That's a problem for data centers that are facing rising power bills, or may be unable to expand because they've maxed out the power available from their utility's local distribution grid. It's also a problem for utilities, some of which are offering incentives to data centers that can show efficiency improvements (see PG&E Wants to Give Away More Money, See Fewer Email Attachments).

That's led to lots of new investment in more efficient equipment, cooling systems and power delivery systems, as well as a push into server virtualization and new sensor and control networks to keep a closer eye on data center energy use (for examples, see stories here, here, here and here).

Server makers see the data center energy crunch as an opportunity to speed up the typical cycles for replacing old equipment by offering more energy-efficient gear (see Will Energy Accelerate the Computer Refresh Cycle?).

Abbott Cuts Water Use by 1B Gallons a Year

At the end of September, we wrote about how medical supply giant Abbott cut oil and gas consumption by 35 percent compared to a 2006 baseline though, in part, waste heat technologies.

Now, the company says it is saving one billion gallons of water a year, a key milestone considering that some of its facilities are in water-starved Singapore. The company set out to get to 40 percent below its water consumption of 2004 by 2011 but it's already there. Water consumed in manufacturing processes is down 37 percent.

How did the company accomplish it? Through a variety of technologies like installing more water-efficient scrubbers for controlling dust in a Michigan facility or by installing tighter-fitting pipes in other facilities. An Arizona plant implemented leak tags to ensure that leaks are detected and fixed at a more rapid rate.

Conserving water saves energy too – around 5 percent of California's power revolves around transporting water. (The figure climbs to 19 percent if you add heating.) IBM is working on a number of water projects these days as well. Carbon, water and energy are all interrelated, according to IBM.