Smart Grid Blog

By this summer you can expect to find the first energy devices — smart meters, energy management dashboards, connected thermostats — that can link with Microsoft’s online energy management tool Hohm. Troy Batterberry, Microsoft’s product unit manager of its Energy Management & Home Automation division, told us in an interview on Tuesday that Microsoft has just released the software developer kit for Hohm to third party device makers and he is expecting Hohm to connect with devices– likely smart meters first — this summer. Batterberry also told us Microsoft “might” even one day develop its own Microsoft-branded energy hardware, but for now is focused on connecting with third party gadget makers.

via Microsoft Hohm to Connect with Devices this Summer, One Day Offer Its Own?.

Microsoft Hohm , the software giant’s new home energy management system, is now available for the 3.4 million households served by utility Xcel Energy . This is the second time the tool, which makes energy use and pricing data available via a web interface , has been tested with a mass audience.

via Microsoft Hohm launches for Xcel Energy customers.

Microsoft’s Hohm home energy platform will soon be able to deliver monthly energy use data for all of Xcel Energy’s 3.4 million customers across eight states, all without smart meters. The two companies plan to announce the news on Friday at an event at Microsoft’s campus in Fargo, N.D., a Microsoft spokesperson said Thursday.

Xcel is the second utility to link customer data to Hohm. Last month, Seattle City Light started offering its roughly one million customers a data feed of their utility bill information via the web platform.

via Greentech Media: Microsoft Hohm: First Seattle City Light, Now Xcel Energy | Green Light.

Microsoft Corp. today announced it has developed a reference architecture based on familiar, cost-effective Microsoft platforms that can serve as the basis for development of the “integrated utility of the future.”

The Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA) is Microsoft’s first comprehensive reference architecture that addresses technology integration throughout the full scope of the smart energy ecosystem. The Microsoft SERA helps utilities by providing a method of testing the alignment of information technology with their business processes to create an integrated utility. This is the second utility offering to be released from Microsoft in four months, following the announcement of Microsoft Hohm, an online application developed to enhance the experience of utilities’ customers and provide further insight into the supply and demand of residential energy use.

via Microsoft Launches Software Architecture for ‘Integrated Utility of the Future’ | SYS-CON AUSTRALIA.

When Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu visited the Daily Show with John Stewart last week, he couldn’t give Stewart an honorary membership to the National Academy of Sciences, so instead Chu gave Steward a “Nerds of America Society” t-shirt.

Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize winner who recently joined Facebook, was on Comedy Central boosting the administration’s $60 billion investment in American clean energy and energy efficiency in front of a big, young audience eager for change.

That kind of money is no laughing matter and dozens of technology companies, from GE to Google to a spate of newly incorporated startups, are lining up to compete for their slice of the pie.

Google announced Power Meter in February to help utility companies display electricity consumption data to customers via the web. Studies have shown that when consumers have real-time data (via a smart grid or home rig), they tend to consume less electricity and save money.

Microsoft fired back in June with Hohm, which doesn’t wait for smart grid deployment to begin helping homeowners save money. Give Hohm an exhaustive set of details about your home (pun intended – an Ohm is a unit for measuring electrical current) and it returns a tailored set of energy efficiency improvement recommendations.

Companies haven’t begun marketing all this fancy new smart grid technology and data to consumers yet, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from getting increasingly interested in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

via With Consumer Interest in Energy Efficiency Rising Online, Some Utilities May Be Missing Out.

Nearly four years ago, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates told me the software giant had no interest in playing a direct role in the development of “smart-grid” technologies. In fact, he seemed rather uninformed about its potential.

That, of course, was before the U.S. Department of Energy set aside nearly $4 billion (U.S.) to throw at smart-grid development and demonstration projects. As one of the hottest areas of venture capital investment these days – similar in many ways to the early days of the Internet boom, thanks to an energy-literate U.S. president – the smart-grid opportunity is now drawing some big names, including Microsoft.

The company announced on June 24 a new web-based home energy management application called Hohm, “an easy-to-use tool that helps consumers lower their energy bill and reduce their impact on the environment.” It is a rather simple application but it gets Microsoft inside the smart-grid bubble, where Google Inc. is also hoping to establish its brand through the launch earlier this year of its PowerMeter home energy management tool.

If the smart grid is to become the next big area of technology investment – some say even bigger than the Internet – then it is understandable that Microsoft, Google, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and other giants of the computing and networking world want some flesh in the game. It also means there is a chance for new Googles and Microsofts to emerge, and some are already making that attempt.

via TheStar.com | sciencetech | Old and new players chase smart-grid technology.

While broadband service provider networks and utilities’ two-way smart grids belong together, the utilities are acting like a reluctant bride in an arranged marriage. Reasonable adults can see that combining the two is a good idea, but utilities and communications companies are oftentimes miles apart over standards, access and security. As a result, utilities are resisting any forced union that would involve hooking up their meters to customers’ broadband connections rather than a private network.

And that’s a shame, given how combining broadband and utility-provided smart meters could help consumers access web-based applications from Google’s PowerMeter to Microsoft’s Hohm, and to deliver innovative services such as tweets about home energy consumption. It’s also cheaper to use a home’s broadband than for a utility to build its own network. And data can be displayed to the customer a lot faster, too, because the speed of a normal broadband connection is generally faster than a utility’s private network. It can take as long as 24 hours to display the info back to the consumer on utility networks.

After reading about innovation in Germany where an electric company uses a customer’s broadband connection to help deliver intelligence about power use, I called my local utility, Austin Energy, which is considered an innovator in green energy. I wanted to find out how broadband and utility companies would deliver such services without using the same network, and why Austin Energy isn’t eager for any marriage of networks.

via Should We Force Marriage Between Broadband and Power Cos?.

Bringing people together to save energy and money.

Sign up and start saving with Microsoft’s Hohm (U.S. beta) website.

via Microsoft Hohm.

n recent weeks many utilities have announced major deals with third-party developers of smart grid software. One that hasn’t made such an announcement is Pacific Gas & Electric. Andy Tang, senior director of the Smart Energy Web at PG&E spoke with Reuters this week about why the company has not chosen a third-party developer.

Tang said that the giant California utility’s strategy is to wait for the Open Smart Grid group to come up with a standard interface for energy management software before it decides to sign up for Google’s PowerMeter, Microsoft’s Hohm, or similar offerings from other companies.

“I don’t want to pick winners,” said Tang. “I want to work on more of a neutral ground.” Tang went on to explain that with the numerous development firms and their various options for energy management, PG&E is hesitant to pick one unless the integration is seamless and processes involved are standardised. Tang said that PG&E isn’t going to develop software for third parties because the utility lacks those resources.

The Open Smart Grid group’s members include diverse utilities and third-party vendors and serves as a clearinghouse for best practices and industry standards. Eventually the participating members will incorporate the group’s standards into their software development.

via PG&E waiting for smart grid standards.

Are you ready to give Microsoft’s energy management tool Hohm a spin? On Monday morning at 6 a.m. (pacific time) Microsoft is opening up the doors on Hohm to the general public, about two weeks after the software giant revealed the idea behind its energy management tool. Hohm, which will enable home owners to track their energy consumption and potentially modify their energy behavior in a variety of ways, is in beta mode, and Microsoft told us it will be tweaking the software — making it smarter — according to user feedback. So here’s your first chance to give it a whirl and tell ‘em what you really think.

We checked out the tool this weekend pre-launch, and here are my first impressions. Hohm can use as little information as a ZIP code to start predicting your energy consumption, and then the more questions (up to 180) you answer about your residence (like the numbers of doors and windows and type of water heating technology), the more accurate the tool can be. Down the road, the goal is to have the tool link with your utility, integrating your real historical energy data, and then ultimately work with smart meters and other smart devices to provide closer to real-time energy data consumption data.

Using just my ZIP code, those prediction algorithms, licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy, are not so bad — Hohm predicted around $750 in annual heating costs per year, and $2,000 in total energy costs, which sounds a little high, but close to the annual bill of my house. And when I answered more questions (about 30 percent of my profile), the energy consumption dropped a bit, i.e., got smarter.

via Feedback Wanted: Microsoft’s Energy Tool Hohm Goes Live | Reuters.

Nearly four years ago, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates told me the software giant had no interest in playing a direct role in the development of “smart-grid” technologies. In fact, he seemed rather uninformed about its potential.

That, of course, was before the U.S. Department of Energy set aside nearly $4 billion (U.S.) to throw at smart-grid development and demonstration projects. As one of the hottest areas of venture capital investment these days – similar in many ways to the early days of the Internet boom, thanks to an energy-literate U.S. president – the smart-grid opportunity is now drawing some big names, including Microsoft.

The company announced on June 24 a new web-based home energy management application called Hohm, “an easy-to-use tool that helps consumers lower their energy bill and reduce their impact on the environment.” It is a rather simple application but it gets Microsoft inside the smart-grid bubble, where Google Inc. is also hoping to establish its brand through the launch earlier this year of its PowerMeter home energy management tool.

If the smart grid is to become the next big area of technology investment – some say even bigger than the Internet – then it is understandable that Microsoft, Google, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and other giants of the computing and networking world want some flesh in the game. It also means there is a chance for new Googles and Microsofts to emerge, and some are already making that attempt.

via TheStar.com | sciencetech | Old and new players chase smart-grid technology.