Smart Grid Blog

Without a doubt, one of the most in-demand topics for insight at GigaOM Pro is the smart grid, and subscribers are hungry to learn more about emerging opportunities across the hardware, software, services and infrastructure sub-segments.

Because of this, we will be hosting our second Research Roundtable webinar entitled, “Biggest Opportunities in the Smart Grid” on Wednesday, Oct. 7. Joining us to provide their expert insight will be Clint Wheelock, Managing Director at Pike Research, and Katie Fehrenbacher, Editor of Earth2Tech. Both Clint and Katie will be joined by GigaOM Pro’s own Celeste LeCompte, a cleantech domain expert in her own right.

via Research Roundtable: Biggest Smart Grid Opportunities — GigaOM Pro.

The world’s largest chipmaker has been looking at the smart grid for about a year. But the slow speed of the market and hesitancy utilities have to swap out older equipment for new is giving it pause.

The smart grid offers a gargantuan opportunity for a company interested in finding new uses for its computer and consumer-electronics chips. Buildings consume about 40 percent of the nation’s power and are responsible for more than 40 percent of its CO2 emissions.

Clearly new ways of doing things need to be found. At the heart of this change is the need for grid devices to have more intelligence and therefore the ability to channel information and control to utility administrators and consumers. It is the ideal job for today’s powerful semiconductors.

But equipment in the grid is typically designed for a 10 to 20 years lifespan. That makes it difficult to quickly incorporate new generations of chips that come out every year or two.

via Intel Looking Cautiously At Smart Grid « TechPulse 360.

With more requests than money, the U.S. Department of Energy faces the tough task of allocating more than $4 billion among hundreds of utilities that want to modernize the country’s aging electricity grid.

Like bees to honey, utilities of all sizes are swarming a DOE program offering stimulus money to create a “smart grid” with systems offering consumers control over energy use, utilities an ability to shorten power outages and wind and solar power generators more access to power-hungry cities.

As the contest for the federal grants heats up, utilities are left guessing how the DOE will prioritize the requests. Many worry that if the funds are spread too thinly, the program may do little to meet its ambitious goal.

via U.S. utilities scramble for smart-grid cash.

Increasing the efficiency of electrical power networks can help fight climate change, since any improvement means less carbon-based fuel needs to be burned to generate power, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions into the environment. Upgraded electrical networks also encourage the integration of renewable energy sources, like wind power and photovoltaic energy, into utilities’ power generation portfolio, further reducing the need to burn oil, gas or coal to meet our ever-growing electrical power needs.

Upgrading electrical networks into smart grids also allows them to act as a communication infrastructure reaching from the energy source all the way to the customer’s premises, permitting real-time adjustments of electrical demand and delivery, according to NextGen Research’s study “Smart Grid Applications: Demand Response, Decentralized Generation and Smart Meters Increase Electrical Networks’ Capabilities, Efficiency and Reliability” (URL: http://www.nextgenresearch.com/research/1002016-Smart_Grid_Applications). Enabling advanced information technology and communications tools to operate through that infrastructure will permit utilities to optimize power generation and delivery.

The study’s author, Atakan Ozbek, notes that “economic considerations are also key” for the deployment of smart grids, since they will “reduce transaction costs and increase the profitability of technology investment for renewable energy and for advanced communications.” Further, he observes that “political pressure will be on the utility sector to deploy smart grid networks,” since regulators and politicians alike will value such deployments “for their ability to create jobs as the job market continues to tighten due to the ongoing economic contraction.”

via The Benefits of Smart Grids Include Fighting Climate Change, says NextGen Research.

The 90-page draft lays out 77 proposed standards for smart grid, and 14 “priority” areas where it will rush standards development.

The federal government released its anxiously awaited draft of smart grid standards on Thursday, laying out a host of specific standards utilities and vendors will be expected to meet in smart grid deployments, as well as 14 “priority” areas and an ongoing cybersecurity standards-setting process it hopes to complete by 2010.

It’s the next stage in a process begun this spring to rush a standards development process that might otherwise take several years into a months-long timeframe.

“At stake is America’s energy future and the economic competitiveness of our nation,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in introducing the report at the GridWeek conference in Washington, D.C.

via Greentech Media: Smart Grid Standards Roadmap Unveiled.

The Commerce Department unveiled the first 77 “smart grid” standards today aimed at removing a major barrier to the implementation of digital grid technologies.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology draft report (pdf) highlights 31 standards with “relevance” to smart-grid development and another 46 standards as “potentially” applicable to the smart grid.

“Central to this report is cybersecurity,” Secretary Gary Locke said at the GridWeek conference in Washington, D.C. “We need to do it right, but we cannot take forever because everything else depends on the foundation of our cybersecurity efforts.”

via Obama Admin Releases Initial ‘Smart Grid’ Standards – NYTimes.com.

Demand response is still in its infancy, but experiments in the two-way, real-time service have shown how much it can transform utilities, one of the most inefficient industries in the country, Edison Electric Institute President Thomas Kuhn said today on a Grid Week panel. Unfortunately, consumer resistance to accepting the service from their utility provider may be holding the service back.

In SmartGridCity, a pilot program in Boulder, Colo., that brings together all the different communications technologies and services into one community, utility Xcel Energy has finished its infrastructure and smart meter rollout and is now in the process of collecting feedback from its initial trials. So far Dick Kelly, president, chairman and CEO of Xcel Energy, has learned that consumers aren’t as amenable to the service as originally anticipated.

via Grid Week: Are utilities the best smart grid services provider?.

In years to come, you could be looking at the humble electrical socket on your wall in a whole new light.

Singapore is setting up an experimental base for a future islandwide ’smart’ energy grid which potentially will be able to incorporate power not just from mainstream power stations but also from new alternative energy sources.

With electric cars looking like becoming viable, one little scenario might involve car owners selling unused electrical power back into the national power grid while being also able to tap into the grid to recharge their batteries as needed.

But the possibilities as to what can be fed into the grid to diversify its sources will be limited only by the imagination and feasible technology. Potential sources could involve biodiesel, solar photo-voltaic cells or any feasible future technology.

via A*Star flips a switch on smart energy – September 25, 2009.

Atmel Corporation today announced that the BitCloud(TM) ZigBee PRO stack has been awarded ZigBee Smart Energy product certification. BitCloud Smart Energy offers utility companies a secure, proven and easy-to-use technology for wireless home area networks (HANs) by connecting in-premise devices, such as meters, thermostats and smart appliances, to each other and to wide area energy distribution and control networks. ZigBee Smart Energy enables utility companies and individual homeowners to manage energy usage, control residential peak demand and reduce overall environmental impact.

…

“BitCloud SE has been certified by National Technical Systems (NTS) using our high performance, low power AT86RF231 RF-transceiver, in combination with our newest generation of ATxmega256A3 8-bit microcontrollers,” said Magnus Pedersen, Marketing Director for MCU Wireless Solutions, Atmel Corporation. “Devices in the AVR XMEGA(TM) microcontroller family is ideal to run low-power wireless designs, simultaneous with ZigBee stack and profiles for end-user applications.”

“NTS is pleased to see manufacturers, such as Atmel, use NTS’s Smart Energy Test Harness, allowing them to quickly and easily obtain a certification for their ZigBee Smart Energy products,” said Osman Sakr, Chief Technology Officer of NTS. “We are looking forward to helping Atmel and other manufacturers bring their products to market to assist in the national development of a smart grid.”

via ATML Atmel Corporation: Atmel Receives ZigBee Smart Energy Certification For BitCloud Software Stack.

Synapse Wireless, a provider of Internet-enabled, wireless machine-to-machine, or “M2M,” communication systems is embracing the OpenHAN specifications for the advancement of smart grid home automation networks.

Wade Patterson, CEO of Synapse, said that the company currently has an auto-forming, multi-hop, mesh network, software system that brings interoperability to the Internet using existing standards.

“We have the technology that supports the goals of UCAIug’s OpenHAN today,” Patterson said.

As a member of the UCAInternational Users Group, or “UCAIug,” a non-profit users group comprised of organizations involved in the electric utility industry’s smart grid initiative, it seems highly plausible that the company hopes to use its technological expertise to advancement the movement.

via Smart Grid.

German technology group Siemens has stated that it wants to receive orders worth more than €6bn for intelligent power networks over the next five years.

The global electronics and electrical engineering giant which operates in the energy and healthcare sectors and has around 420,000 employees, generated nearly €19bn in fiscal 2008 from its operations in smart grid, about a quarter of the company’s total revenue for this period. Siemens will expand its smart grid portfolio in the field of power data management in the coming fiscal year when it plans to take over a 60 per cent stake in German IT management firm, Energy4U in October 2009.

‘We are already on the optimal course in the smart grids business and will be running at top speed in the future. A new age for power supplies is dawning with smart grids,’ said Wolfgang Dehen, CEO of the Siemens Energy Sector. Siemens anticipates that orders for smart grid technologies will reach nearly €1bn in the current fiscal year. ‘The smart grid market will see increasingly dynamic growth fuelled by climate change and economic stimulus programmes. We want to grow twice as fast as the overall market,’ added Dehen.

via NewNet News – Siemens aims for €6bn smart grid orders by 2014.

Between GridWeek sessions last week, I sat down with Marie Hattar, VP Network Systems and Security Solutions Marketing at Cisco, and talked with her about upcoming breakthroughs in smart grid data solutions, standards and interoperability of platforms, and Cisco’s smart grid plans.

Marie and other Cisco team members were among the thought-leaders at the GridWeek conference, and Marie wrapped up the week by moderating a session on “The Future of the Electric Utility – Business Models.” I’ve included some of her comments from that session as well as our interview (which, as you can tell from the footage, was my first on-camera interview and rough on my end).

via Cisco “Smart grid is like the old, old west with pioneers:” GridWeek interview with Marie Hattar, Cisco VP for Smart Grid and Marketing.

Exacter, Inc. reportedly announced its technology is being used by more than 100 service providers and related vendors to identify communication and power line malfunctioning, prevent outages and improve distribution reliability by pinpointing the exact problem areas along smart grid lines.

“Failing and poorly installed equipment can literally stop data transmission in Power Line Carrier and Broadband over Power Line systems which are the backbone of smart grid deployments,” said John Lauletta, CEO Exacter, in a statement. “Utilities are telling us that they want to prepare for smart grid. They want to harden their systems, and Exacter technology has a unique ability to locate signal interference from failing equipment that impacts data throughput.”

A recent report said that American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 allotted $11 billion, of the total $63 billion toward energy, for smart grid initiatives until the end of 2010, and the public, private, and consumer factors are all driving this growth.

via Smart Grid.

After recent hacking attempts on smart metering technology, HP has launched a security audit for smart grid services

HP has launched a new audit service for smart grid technology, in response to a series of successful hacking attempts against energy meters and other infrastructure.

Announced at HP’s Executive Energy Conference 2009 in Budapest, the HP Smart Grid Security Quality Assessment (SGSQA) service is aimed at utility companies and smart grid operators. It is based on existing security audit methodology HP has used internally for over six years to test its own software and hardware in sectors such as defence – and is consequently “highly mature”, the company said.

“There is a lot of concern about the security in this field,” Ian Mitton, world wide director of utilities at HP said at the event. Recent successful hacking attempts against some smart meter technology had led some energy company’s to reconsider the security aspects of the technology, he said. “That has caused a lot of concern in the market and this is our response to that.”

via HP Tightens Smart Grid Security – News – eWeekEurope.co.uk.

On the heels of GridWeek 2009, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a draft list of 77 standards intended to insure interoperability of new smart grid technologies and devices.

One of the biggest concerns with smart grid implementation is that the many devices and services coming into the market can communicate energy data seamlessly. This is specifically important for solar energy so that the full potential of solar technology can be taken to the next level. For example, let’s imagine that transportation has been electrified and your rooftop solar panels are configured to power your home and work smoothly to charge your first-generation plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).

via NIST Identifies Smart Grid Interoperability Standards | GetSolar.com Blog.