Smart Grid Blog

… Obama has already taken several whacks at waste in energy and health care. His stimulus had over $20 billion for energy-efficiency measures designed to slash electricity use in low-income homes, military bases and all kinds of government buildings, while his fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles are expected to save billions of gallons of gasoline; he’s also providing government financing for electric cars, and his cash-for-clunkers program is another assault on gas guzzlers.

…So don’t expect government intervention on the demand side — through education campaigns, tax incentives or targeted subsidies — to rein in our cravings. But in the energy arena, several states have already proven that rationalizing incentives on the supply side can transform the landscape. In most of the country, per capita electricity use has increased about 50% over the past three decades — despite conservation programs, efficiency incentives and the general rise of green. But in California and the Pacific Northwest, where state legislatures decoupled utility profits from sales volumes, electricity use has been flat. Instead of an incentive to sell more power and build more generating plants, the utilities had an incentive to help their customers save electricity and avoid the need for new generating plants. So that’s what they did. Energy providers were much better than the government at influencing the behaviors of energy consumers. “That’s what we need in health care,” says Dr. Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Institute. “When providers get rewarded for volume, they provide volume. That’s got to change.”

via How to Reform Health Care and Energy: Use Less – TIME.

The US Department of Energy is ready to spend $3.9 billion (£2.4bn) on efforts to modernise the U.S. electric grid

A part of the Recovery Act funds, the DOE has earmarked $3.3 billion (£2bn) for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program and $615 million for smart grid demonstration projects.

The DOE (Department of Energy) announced on 25 June the agency is ready to solicit applications for $3.9 billion in grants to support efforts to modernise the electric grid. The money is part of the Recovery Act funds approved by Congress earlier this year.

Approximately $3.3 billion is earmarked for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program and $615 million for smart grid demonstration projects to help develop and implement smart grid technologies across the country.

via US To Spend £2bn On Smart Grid Technology – News – eWeekEurope.co.uk.

How much easily recovered oil is really left? At what high-end prices are practices like directional drilling and 4D exploration financially feasible? At which low-end prices does renewable energy cease to become a financially feasible option?

It appears from the many news reports, opinion pieces, and general facts that easily recovered oil reserves are running out. There are new discoveries of relatively easy recovered oil, but the frequency of these ‘finds’ are few and far between. At 140 per barrel, projects like OCS deep sea drilling and Canadian oil sands are viable. The spike last summer where the price of a barrel of oil reached 140 dollars was, in essence, an indication of the volatility inherent in oil markets; couple that together with lower global reserves and international affairs with Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia…and you have the perfect ingredients for a rough investment ride.

Renewable Energy in the form of smart grids, batteries and energy storage, biofuels, EVs, geothermal, solar, wind, pollution control, waste, and water, all seem to be a natural substitution to the high-end instability of oil markets; but there seems to be a low-end price of oil that represents the point at which renewable energy markets reach a bottom. That point was in early 2009.

via Renewable Energy and the price of oil.

Seattle-based Powerit Solutions, a leading provider of intelligent energy management systems to more than 2,500 commercial and industrial facilities worldwide, won a Connectivity Week Buildy Award June 10 for its work implementing automated demand response technology (Auto-DR) for Amy’s Kitchen of Petaluma, California. Using Powerit’s technology, Amy’s reduced its electricity use 44% during a simulated Auto-DR event.

Powerit’s Spara EMS™ lets users like Amy’s Kitchen take a series of strategic, predetermined steps to trim power demand during key times without negatively impacting productivity. Clients can save and even earn money by participating in demand response programs, which manage energy consumption dynamically through cooperation between power customers, the electric utility, and the electric system’s partners. Participants receive payment for reducing energy consumption by a certain amount during demand response events initiated by the utility.

The utility, in turn, benefits by creating more capacity without having to build additional infrastructure or buy power on the open market. Auto-DR takes this one step further by automating the entire process – from the utility just notifying the participant to making the actual necessary consumption adjustments via a direct remote connection to the site.

“Our work with Amy’s shows the dramatic energy savings that can be achieved with smart grid devices that use finely tuned rules-based software,” said Bob Zak, general manager and president of Powerit Solutions and a panel speaker at Connectivity Week. “We’re honored by this award and are proud of the solutions we provide to help industrial users large and small participate in demand response programs with their utilities. Controlling demand during peak times is vital to meeting the nation’s energy objectives and we look forward to providing more innovations to this emerging sector in the future.”

The Buildy Awards were presented at an industry gala as part of the Connectivity Week 2009 Conference and Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Powerit won in the Industrial Connectivity Implementation category, which recognizes the developer or installer that uses smart device connectivity to best demonstrate energy efficiency in an industrial application.

The University of California, Berkeley Demand Response Research Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory nominated Powerit for successfully integrating Open Auto-DR communication infrastructure (Auto-DR that’s compliant with open standards) at Amy’s Kitchen. Powerit is a member of the Demand Response Research Center’s industry advisory group.

via Powerit Solutions Wins Smart Grid Connectivity Award for Its Work with Amy’s Kitchen.

IBM’s “smarter planet initiative” seeks to connect everything from railways to the power grid to buildings with sensors, software and communications gear. And to accomplish such a feat (to basically act as a platform to connect various infrastructure), the computing company needs friends — a whole lot of them. On Tuesday at the company’s Green and Beyond Summit for Industry in San Francisco, Big Blue announced a slew of smart systems-focused partnerships with fellow tech giants, regulators and research institutes.

One of IBM’s most far-reaching new partnerships is called the Green Sigma Coalition, and it’s starting out with eight charter members, including Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, Cisco, Siemens and others. According to IBM, each of the allied companies plans to integrate their tech with a set of products and services it has designed to help firms meter, monitor and analyze energy and water use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste (the company’s so-called “Green Sigma solution”). The idea is to offer customers a single, comprehensive view of their resource use, efficiency and overall environmental impact.

IBM’s allies in the Green Sigma group are hardly strangers. In addition to the new coalition, IBM is announcing today that it has integrated its Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management system with both Cisco’s EnergyWise energy management system and Honeywell’s building management offering. Honeywell has had a chief role in building management for years, and Cisco has recently declared ambitious smart grid plans, so the two companies will likely be useful partners for IBM. IBM also doesn’t accept just any firm as a partner — firms have to go through a software validation process to make the cut. In addition to Cisco and Honeywell, IBM says it has “validated” Novell and Thunderhead.

via Lesson From IBM: Smart Energy Systems Need a Lot of Friends.

The American electric grid is an engineering marvel, arguably the single largest and most complex machine in the world. It’s also 40 years old and so rickety that power interruptions and blackouts cost the economy some $150 billion a year. The idea of building a connected “smart” grid that can route power intelligently is beyond daunting, no matter how much stimulus money gets thrown at it. But if we want to cut carbon, we have no choice. Today’s grid simply cannot handle a large-scale rollout of the clean-energy sources outlined in this series.

In part that’s because we need new high-voltage power lines to connect parts of the country where renewable resources are abundant (the sunny Southwest deserts, the windy Great Plains) to the cities and suburbs where more people live. But the more fundamental problem is that most renewable power sources don’t behave like fossil-fuel sources — they can’t be turned on and off on demand. Wind farms produce power only when the wind blows; solar, only when the sun shines. This is problematic, because power demand is twofold: We need “baseload” power that’s predictable and steady, and “peak” power for daily spikes in demand (when, say, everyone arrives home and turns on their air conditioning). Intermittent renewables are not well suited to either. But with more power lines connecting power sources over a broader geographical area, renewables can simulate baseload power. (The wind is always blowing somewhere.) And a smarter grid cleverly shifting power demand around can redirect enough clean electricity to handle it when demand increases suddenly.

via The Plan to Build the Next Electric Grid | Popular Science.

Concepts like “smart grids” and “intelligent metering” are difficult for the non-expert brain to grasp. So instead, wrap your mind around a simpler set of facts. Utilities experience peak demand — for example, on blistering hot days when air conditioners are pumping all out — just 2% of the year.

Yet to serve their customers on such days, the utilities will incur as much as 15% of their total costs for the year while using their oldest, dirtiest generating plants to satisfy the demand.

In other words, it’s a dirty, costly affair to keep us comfortable for a relatively short period of time.

Imagine, then, the benefits of an electric network ­– often called a grid because of the wired interconnections among power plants, homes and businesses ­– that “think” intelligently.

Such a smart network would tell customers things like the cheapest time to wash the dishes or charge an electric car. It would represent huge savings, financially and environmentally.

via Tech Daily: Silver Spring – the Cisco of smart grids? – Jun. 23, 2009.

The U.S. Department of Energy granted funds from the stimulus package to Michigan and Iowa on Monday to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects totaling more than $48 million.

Michigan was granted $32.8 million and will enact a program to reduce energy consumption in public buildings by 20 percent by 2012, establish green communities, create markets for renewable energy systems, and create sustainable jobs in energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors, the DOE said in a statement.

Iowa was granted $16.2 million and will expand the Building Energy Smart Iowa Program under the Iowa Office of Energy Independence (OEI).

“This funding will provide an important boost for state economies, help put Americans back to work, and move us toward energy independence,” said Secretary Steven Chu in a statement today.

The national program funding is intended to be spent at the local and state level for immediate economic impact, the department said today.

via Michigan, Iowa get Federal funds for energy efficiency, clean energy – International Business Times -.

The Department of Energy has released the first third of its $25 billion advanced technology loan fund for automakers to “create thousands of green jobs while helping reduce the nation’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

The agency released about $8 billion, with Ford the largest beneficiary, receiving $5.9 billion. Nissan received $1.6 billion and Tesla Motors got $465 million. Sue Cischke, an environmental vice president at Ford, said “this is not related to our financial viability — it’s very different, and it’s what governments do — assisting the best green technology.”

Ms. Cischke said the financing would be applied to improving the fuel efficiency of more than a dozen Ford cars and trucks, including the Focus, Escape, Mustang, Taurus and F-150 pickup.

Nissan’s $1.6 billion will be applied to retrofitting its Smyrna, Tenn., plant to build the company’s forthcoming (and as yet unnamed) electric sedan. Construction is expected to start in late 2012.

via U.S. Technology Loans for Ford, Nissan and Tesla – Wheels Blog – NYTimes.com.

With energy efficiency on the rise, a committee requested the Champaign City Council’s approval in applying for an energy grant from the federal government.

The committee will submit an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant application by Thursday. The city has access to $763,200 from the federal government through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The specific sectors that would receive funding was open ended, said Teri Legner, Economic Development Manager.

“The application was wide open for the most part,” she said.

The committee suggested that the funds be directed towards city buildings, the police department and the fire department. The group also received input from the University’s College of Architecture Smart Energy Design Assistance Center.

“They helped us kind of pare down where we need things and where they’re voids in our community in particular,” Legner said.

Smart Energy suggested that a portion of the funding be directed towards non-profit organizations. In the four years the organization has been operating, they have performed over 400 energy audits in Illinois, said Ben Sliwinski, technical director of Smart Energy.

via Champaign applies for energy grant | The Daily Illini.

Comverge Inc. (Nasdaq: COMV) and Itron (Nasdaq: ITRI) today announced the successful integration of Comverge’s Web-based demand management platform, Apollo(TM), and OpenWay(R), the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution from Itron, enabling interactive, two-way communication between the utility and its customer, a significant step toward the smart grid.

This integration will enable utilities investing in AMI to expand energy efficiency and demand response programs. Leveraging the OpenWay infrastructure, Apollo allows utilities to communicate with energy management devices to perform demand response events and send and receive price and rate signals. The integration will aid in reducing strain on the electric grid during times of peak demand and help customers manage their energy costs.

“This development is another realization in the promise of our Apollo platform and is a significant step toward the smart grid vision of the future,” said Comverge Chief Technology Officer, Bud Vos. “The Apollo/OpenWay collaboration will facilitate a utility’s adoption of AMI by providing a secure, real-time communication between utility and customer. The combination of these smart grid technologies enables a true two-way dialogue that will engage the consumer and utility and provide them with the necessary tools to use energy more efficiently.”

via Comverge, Itron Collaboration Further Advances the Smart Grid.

Today, Microsoft took the wraps off a new Web service dedicated to managing energy use. Called “Hohm” (presumably, a play on the combination of “home and “Ohm”), the product will take advantage of smart grid data on energy use when it’s available. Even when it’s not, however, Hohm will allow users to input their own details and share the results of their efficiency efforts, adding a bit of a Web 2.0 sheen to matters. The move comes after a number of other major IT powers, including Google and Cisco, have announced their own efforts in the area, suggesting that a lot of people think this market is about to take off.

The Hohm service itself is a bit of a hybrid of a number of services. From the smart grid perspective, a growing number of hardware makers are producing equipment that uses standardized methods of structuring and reporting data. That allows just about anyone to plug into the data, provided they’re willing to work with utilities to obtain it. At the moment, Microsoft has lined up four utilities that will work when the service starts up, but they’re certainly going to be working hard to bring more on before then. Two smart meter companies were also in on the announcement, indicating that Microsoft has already started validating the input from some of the existing hardware.

The data, however it’s obtained, will be stored using Redmond’s cloud offering, Windows Azure. The people behind Hohm have undoubtedly benefited from the experience of those who’ve built Microsoft’s medical records service, which also uses Azure.

via Microsoft wants your Hohm to use the smart grid – Ars Technica.

In the 1950s a Stanford University College of Engineering dean leased vacant university-owned land to high-tech companies to generate income and create job opportunities for graduating students. This simple and brilliant idea generated billions and created one of the most successful U.S. industrial centers – Silicon Valley.

Now there’s an opportunity to create a similar tech center in New Mexico to capitalize on perhaps the biggest business opportunity in decades — smart energy. John Doerr, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who helped fund startups like Google, says “green tech,” especially energy, is the “mother of all markets.”

Central to this energy opportunity is “Smart Grid”, which got national attention during the presidential election and then with passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. ARRA funds $4.3 billion in Smart Grid projects, which could kick-start an industry and give New Mexico an opportunity. Smart Grid uses information technology for the electric system, or grid, to effectively deliver electricity, change the way we buy it and engage consumers to use it efficiently.

Dan Reicher, Climate Change director for Google, wrote in Newsweek: “If the grid could be in constant communication with your air conditioner, we could avoid brownouts and blackouts and you might get paid for allowing your air conditioner to be cycled on and off imperceptibly.”

State Senate Bill 205, passed this legislative session, creates a unique approach called “Green Grid.” Green Grid services could create enterprise zones for electricity to leverage efficiency and on-site renewable electric generation to reduce consumption, and improve facility carbon footprints. Electricity is the cleanest energy source at the point of use, but it accounts for 38 percent of U.S. energy use and produces 39 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions with electricity are particularly important, as our high-tech lifestyles and businesses demand more electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy projects a 40 percent increase in electric demand over 15 years. New Mexico is already active with Smart Grid, and has an opportunity in what will be a $300 billion market by 2015 according to Brattle Group.

via Smart Grid in New Mexico the next Silicon Valley?.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced on Thursday $3.9 billion in “smart grid” funding aimed at making power transmission around the country more flexible.

Addressing utility executives at an industry meeting, Chu said the funds would help create a system to allocate electricity more efficiently, whether through improved power lines or by allowing batteries in hybrid cars to feed back into the grid when needed.

“Right now, the way we distribute energy, it’s like plumbing, it’s down the hill,” he told reporters at a news conference after his speech to the Edison Electric Institute conference in San Francisco.

Asked about people objecting to high-voltage power lines being built near their homes as part of a smart grid, Chu said he would appeal to U.S. national interests.

via U.S. to spend $3.9 billion on smart power grid: Chu | Green Business | Reuters.

The DOE has issued its official funding opportunity announcement for about $3.9 billion in stimulus package grants for smart grid projects. Security for smart grid systems is among its top concerns.

The Department of Energy has issued its long-awaited guidelines for utilities and companies hoping to get a piece of the multibillion-dollar smart grid stimulus grant package – and security has emerged as a top concern for projects that want to get funded.

The funding opportunity announcement issued Thursday sets rules for how to apply for about $3.9 billion in grants, which will provide part of the cost of qualifying projects.

It’s an important boost for utilities seeking to build out expensive two-way communication and control technologies for their electricity grids, with projects ranging from smart meter networks to sensors and controls for distribution and transmission grids.

As expected, the DOE’s funding will be broken into two categories. The larger portion, about $3.3 billion, is for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, aimed at technologies that can be deployed on a commercial scale.

And the pressure is on to apply for those investment grants, noted John Quealy, managing director of equity research for Canaccord Adams. Letters of intent are due by July 16, and full applications are due by August 6, with awards to be announced in October, he said.

That means “we’ll continue to see a heightened level of news flow by utilities heading into this first deadline,” he said.

The grants will also be split up according to the size of the proposed projects, with those under $20 million to get 40 percent of the total, and larger projects between $20 million and $200 million to get 60 percent of the total, he said.

via Greentech Media: DOE Issues Rules for $3.9B in Smart Grid Stimulus Grants.