-
1. A Next-gen Sodium Grid Battery Outta ARPA-E
-
2. Daily Sprout
-
3. Why Google and Grid Net Should Team Up On the Smart Grid
-
4. First Solar Jumps Aboard Desertec Jumbo Green Energy Project
-
5. What the FCC's National Broadband Plan Recommends for Smart Grid, Energy
-
6. 7 Questions for Grid Net's New Chief Strategist Andres Carvallo
-
7. Trilliant's All-In-One Smart Grid Network
-
8. Digital Lumens Takes a Cue from Smart Grid Tech for LEDs
-
9. Grid Net Scores Austin Energy CIO for Chief Strategist
-
10. FCC Broadband Plan Goal: Use Broadband to Manage Energy Consumption
A Next-gen Sodium Grid Battery Outta ARPA-E
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy Storage
David Lucero, director of alternative energy storage for EaglePicher Technologies, and Gary Yang, scientist of energy storage at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told me in a phone interview on Tuesday that their planar-shaped sodium beta-battery design will be less expensive and will have a 30 percent higher energy density than standard NAS batteries. Eventually the battery could cost $200 per kWh, said Lucero, compared to the current costs of NAS batteries that he said can range closer to $500-$600 per kWh.
What’s the innovation? Lucero and Yang say it’s largely in the planar-shaped design of the battery — most sodium batteries are tubular in shape — which makes the team’s battery able to be stacked for use in projects at large and small scale, cheaper and more reliably than other battery technologies. Lithium-ion batteries can’t be stacked and deliver the same level of reliability, explained Yang. The team is also investigating new types of materials that could help cut the price and raise the energy density.
The development stage of the sodium battery project will cost around $9 million — $7 million from the ARPA-E program and $1.8 million from Eagle Picher. The three-year project has three stages of development, and Lucero said that the group has to meet “go or no-go” milestones all along the way. Bringing a battery like this into production will take more funds, and scaling it into mass production will take many more hundreds of millions of dollars — as recently bankrupted battery startups Firefly Energy and Imara know all too well. (See How EV Battery Startups Can Cross the Valley of Death on GigaOM Pro, subscription required).
The team’s battery is also very much in the proof-of-concept stage at this point, says Yang. The whole point of the ARPA-E program is to fund high-risk, but potentially game-changing, technology, and it’s far from a sure bet that the team’s battery will be able to reach that low-cost goal. One indicator that it will be difficult: Lucero tells us that Eagle Picher started working on the technology 15 years ago for space satellite systems, which can be higher in price than other battery markets. But not foreseeing the rise of the grid storage market, Eagle Picher shut the project down as the market stalled. Now that the project has been revitalized, the team has high hopes that three years and a research partnership between a national lab and an experienced battery manufacturer will give the technology the kick-start it needs.
Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
BYD Backs Off Electric Car Goals: The South China Morning Post reports that Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co. has given up on plans to mass produce its all-electric vehicle in China by the middle of this year. “The company will make 100 E6 electric cars,” for use in the Shenzhen taxi fleet, but “[f]urther development of the vehicles will depend on the success of the taxis.” — Bloomberg
Progress for Lake Turkana Wind Project: “Kenya's Lake Turkana Wind Power project – set to become Africa's largest wind farm – looks to be back on track after securing financing through a new shareholding structure.” — NYT’s Green Inc.
Electric Amsterdam: With the goal of having 200,000 electric cars on its roads by 2040, the city of Amsterdam has announced a €3 million ($4.1 million) plan “aimed at promoting electric vehicle development. On the schedule: subsidies towards vehicle purchase, financial assistance for companies and incentive measures.” – Sustainable-Mobility.org via Green Car Congress
Gaps in U.S. Climate Coping Policy: “The federal government has ’significant gaps’ in its strategy to cope with the increasing effects of climate change on the country, according to a White House report scheduled to be released Tuesday.” According to a draft, the “report will call for better risk assessments, more thorough scientific research and improved coordination of federal and local governments.” — LA Times
Testing, Testing, Smart Meters: “Oncor is conducting about three dozen side-by-side tests of mechanical and digital meters around North and Central Texas in response to consumer complaints that the new meters cause bills to rise. The first results show that they do measure the same way and that they are accurate, said Oncor spokesman Chris Schein.” — Dallas Morning News.
Why Google and Grid Net Should Team Up On the Smart Grid
Katie Fehrenbacher - smart grid
Here’s two unconventional players that could make an influential but unusual team in terms of open standards and innovation for the smart grid: Google and software maker Grid Net. OK, hear me out.
As Grid Net’s new Chief Strategy Officer Andres Carvallo told me last week, Grid Net is looking to build an ecosystem around its vision of a real time, 100-percent Internet Protocol, secure, reliable, scalable, broadband-based smart grid platform. While the wireless standard is the backbone of Grid Net’s first product, Carvallo told me the startup plans to take the core software and explore other technologies as well, including possibly fiber and broadband-over powerline technology.
While Google is a light-weight, if not merely experimental, player in the smart grid, the search engine giant shares that same basic vision for energy (and the Internet in general) as Grid Net: a smart grid based on broadband, open-standards and all IP. Google has developed its PowerMeter web energy tool that can collect smart grid data in real time via a basic Internet connection, and has partnered with gadget makers so that PowerMeter can even bypass smart meters.
Google has also been very vocal on the issue of utilities providing real-time energy data to consumers and has been involved in the process of the California Public Utility Commission asking investor-owned utilities to provide this data to consumers by a certain deadline. On that issue Google’s policy counsel Michael Terrell told us that the CPUC process is "a hugely important proceeding that will determine how the ecosystem in this space evolves.”
So here’s one way I think Google and Grid Net could proceed: pilot Grid Net’s smart grid software over the experimental fiber network that Google plans to build. The search giant’s plan includes setting up an experimental fiber-to-the-home network in select areas of the country that would offer speeds of around 1 Gigabit per second. Google aims to serve between 50,000 and 500,000 people and offer the service at a "competitive cost."
It’s not such a crazy idea for these two companies to work together on a fiber smart grid network. Earlier this month the local Concord Journal reported that the city of Concord has been petitioning Google to try to get a Google fiber project built in its jurisdiction. The Journal says that the city’s application says it “plans to deploy a SmartGrid” over the fiber. (see related story on GigaOM Pro, subscription required, Google Buzz, Fiber and Their Place in the Smart Grid).
The problem with fiber for the smart grid to date is that the infrastructure has been too expensive for utilities. Xcel Energy's showcase smart grid project in Boulder, Colo. has cost a lot more than originally expected, and the Colorado Public Utility Commission says fiber is one of the main culprits for the cost overruns.
But fiber, and other broadband technologies like WiMAX will likely be the future of the smart grid. Today utilities are hesitant to build out robust, high bandwidth networks because of cost, but as the Federal Communication Commission said today in its National Broadband Plan:
The amount of data moving across Smart Grid networks is modest today but is expected to grow significantly because the number of devices, frequency of communications and complexity of data transferred are all expected to increase. Various parties have attempted to estimate bandwidth requirements; none expect existing narrowband communications will be sufficient.
The FCC notes that Sempra Energy says its needs “at least 100 kbps to all utility assets and customer locations,” and DTE Energy has said it needs 200-500 kbps to support pole-mounted distribution devices.
For Google, connecting with Grid Net could mean an interesting test bed for how PowerMeter could integrate more with smart meter software and backend utility systems. And if Google ever had any intentions for its recently-approved ability to buy and sell energy (beyond its carbon footprint claims) it would be reasonable for the search engine giant to test out such a system. Some have speculated that Google’s energy buying and selling program has to do with its intentions to enter the digital living room.
Google has long done small pilots like this, and has launched experimental services like muni WiFi. Google also has a history with WiMAX, investing in Clearwire back in the day, so Google could team up on Grid Net’s current product, too.
I asked both Grid Net’s Carvallo, and Google’s spokesperson to weigh in on the idea. Carvallo told me: We’d be delighted to do a project with Google. Google’s response: We don’t respond on who we are discussing plans with for fiber.
First Solar Jumps Aboard Desertec Jumbo Green Energy Project
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
In the associate partner role, First Solar will contribute expertise to working groups looking at utility-scale PV, while also helping to “prepare the ground for reference projects and a roll-out plan.” The company has signed on for “an initial period of three years.”
Founded in 2009 by a dozen companies, including Germany’s Siemens, Deutsche Bank, insurer Munich Re and utilities RWE and EON, Desertec is estimated to cost a staggering $555 billion. Some of the first major hurdles for implementing the project include developing the business plan (a process expected to take three years), securing financing and permitting.
First Solar has experience in working through these stages for large-scale solar projects. As the company notes, it has built “utility-scale solar power plants in desert conditions” in the U.S. as well as the United Arab Emirates, and it’s working toward development of a 2-gigawatt solar project in Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City.
First Solar may be just the first in a wave of new partners for Desertec. The initiative’s chief executive, Paul van Son, told Reuters last month that five companies hailing from France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Tunisia would be announced in March. “We want to make it more of an international project,” he explained.
"When you look at all the industries you need to have represented in a project like this — finance, insurance, engineering, solar manufacturing, utilities — we have them all,” Christoph Fark, managing director of Schott Solar CS, a founding partner in Desertec, told us last year. “And we have some of the best in each of those areas." For a project of this scale, timeline, cost and complexity, they’ll need ‘em.
Graphic credit DESERTEC Foundation
What the FCC's National Broadband Plan Recommends for Smart Grid,...
Katie Fehrenbacher - @Not for Syndication
For all you broadband junkies, it’s here: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unveiled the first U.S. National Broadband Plan on Tuesday morning. And — what we’re particularly interested in — there’s an entire chapter on Energy and the Environment (Chapter 12, Page 245). The National Broadband Plan looks at how broadband can be used to build out a smarter power grid, make information technology more efficient and make transportation cleaner (the content is very much in line with the speakers and panels at our Green:Net conference in San Francisco on April 29).
Here’s some of the National Broadband Plan’s interesting recommendations on energy and the environment:
Recommendation: “States should reduce impediments and financial disincentives to using commercial service providers for Smart Grid communications.” Our take: Commercial networks can be more cost effective for utilities’ smart grid services, but they’re just not available in many areas. As Nick Sinai, the FCC's new Energy and Environmental Director, said back in January, the FCC has been "exploring ways to encourage private networks built by utilities to operate in the same band, in order to drive down costs, and to drive open, non-proprietary standards," as well as possibly looking to provide available federal spectrum bands.
Recommendation: “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC ) should start a proceeding to explore the reliability and resiliency of commercial broadband communications networks.” Our take: Utilities say that commercial networks aren’t reliable enough, don’t have enough coverage and cost too much, as Grid Net CSO Andres Carvallo told us last week. And another reason that many forget, the FCC cites in the report:
“[M]any large utilities have economic disincentives to use commercial networks and may be making suboptimal choices. As rate-of-return regulated utilities, they typically earn guaranteed profits on the assets they deploy—including private communications networks—but only receive cost recovery if they use commercial networks.”
Recommendation: “The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the FCC should continue their joint efforts to identify new uses for federal spectrum and should consider the requirements of the Smart Grid.” Our take: That’s light on details, but clearly they’re giving a nod to considering federal spectrum for utilities smart grid. As we've pointed out, power providers like AEP and utility trade groups have long been asking for dedicated wireless spectrum. The argument behind these calls is that as utilities roll out more smart grid services, utilities will need more network bandwidth. AEP presented to the FCC group late last year and said, "Dedicated spectrum is much less likely to receive interference and has a remedy procedure if interference is experienced."
Recommendation: “Congress should consider amending the Communications Act to enable utilities to use the proposed public safety 700 MHz wireless broadband network.” Further down in the document the FCC writes, “utilities should be able to share the public safety mobile broadband network for mission-critical communications.” Our take: This is great, all options should be looked at in terms of spectrum for utilities. Spectrum management is one thing that the FCC can use its weight to deliver for the smart grid.
Recommendation: “States should require electric utilities to provide consumers access to, and control of, their own digital energy information, including real-time information from smart meters and historical consumption, price and bill data over the Internet. If states fail to develop reasonable policies over the next 18 months, Congress should consider national legislation to cover consumer privacy and the accessibility of energy data.” Our take: Nice, if the carrot doesn’t work use the stick. Hopefully that means that one day utilities all over the U.S. will be following in the footsteps of states like California, whose public utility commission has called for consumers to have access to smart grid data by the end of 2010 and real-time smart grid data by the end of 2011.
Recommendation: “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) should adopt consumer digital data accessibility and control standards as a model for states.” Our take: Basically FERC should lead the way on accessing data. However, putting FERC in charge of parts of the grid can actually be a bit controversial, see here.
Recommendation: “DOE should consider consumer data accessibility policies when evaluating Smart Grid grant applications, report on the states' progress toward enacting consumer data accessibility and develop best practices guidance for states.” Our take: Good idea, but a little late given the $4 billion in grants for smart grid companies have already been awarded and is slowly getting doled out. I guess if there’s a next round of smart grid grants, this would work.
Recommendation: “The Rural Utilities Services (RUS) should make Smart Grid loans to rural electric cooperatives a priority, including integrated Smart Grid-broadband projects. RUS should favor Smart Grid projects from states and utilities with strong consumer data accessibility policies.” Our take: Like telecom and broadband projects, the FCC is looking to aid access for the rural communities, which tend to get the shaft in infrastructure roll-outs (expensive).
Recommendation: “The FCC should start a proceeding to improve the energy efficiency and environmental impact of the communications industry.” And, “The federal government should take a leadership role in improving the energy efficiency of its data centers.” Our take: While we appreciate the attention to sustainable IT, the FCC doesn’t seem like it knows what to say on the subject. Light on details — I want more.
7 Questions for Grid Net's New Chief Strategist Andres Carvallo
Katie Fehrenbacher - smart grid
Q). Why did you take the role at Grid Net?
AC: At Austin Energy we’ve been drilled into the smart grid for some time — I would call Austin Energy a pioneer for the smart grid. We put a lot of work into putting it all together and as you do all that work you realize there must be a better way. Over the years I learned of so many companies and so many players. Then I met Ray [Ray Bell CEO of Grid Net] and we had some great conversations about the future of the industry and the building blocks, and it was just serendipitous. A lot of what Ray had been working on and what I had wanted to build at Austin Energy had been right on the money. It was clear to me that Ray had already put together a significant portion of my own vision.
Q). Did Austin Energy and Grid Net have any business or financial relationship?
AC: No, no relationship.
Q). What are you set out on doing at Grid Net?
AC: Grid Net has a phenomenal solution that runs on WiMAX. We’re going to educate my peers across the utility industry about that. Most of the folks have not made decisions on this yet, so there is a good opportunity to understand and evaluate it. Our vision is for a real time, 100 percent all Internet Protocol, secure, reliable, scalable smart grid platform versus some of the other stand alone solutions that have been around for a long time, but are not investing in the ecosystem. Radio frequency, mesh, demand response, SCADA networks — a lot of these things are being created over time to be delivered only on the requirements of a single need.
But the smart grid is an entire integration, all about cybersecurity. IP and broadband are all the things that enable that. A lot of these networks are not based on IP and certainly not broadband. We’ll be taking the core technology, the software cell, and explore other technologies as well. We will explore broadband over powerlines. We’re not specifically married to one technology. WiMAX is our first solution, but over time we will offer more.
Q). What’s the promise of WiMAX for the smart grid?
AC: Availability is very important. LTE is not available now. There is not equipment on the premise side yet, and it’s more of a 2012 thing.
Q). What about fiber?
AC: A lot of carriers and utilities have chosen fiber to the house. There are all kinds of options in front of us. Very quickly after this announcement comes out we will be approached by different opportunities and markets. Grid Net will have to pick our battles and our partnerships. Broadband over powerlines is another choice. A key thing that Grid Net has created so far, is the backend software and network management software that can scale to infinity.
Q). Do you see a WiMAX smart grid in the U.S. made up by networks that utilities build on their own or from a national service provider like Clearwire and Sprint?
AC: Currently utilities don’t use public networks for three reasons: 1). Coverage, they’re just not available, and the equipment isn’t placed where people play. 2). Reliability, and 3). Price. So utilities tend to want to build their own networks today. But WiMAX is available in both flavors. Arcadian owns spectrum and have decided to embrace WiMAX, too. As utilities become aware of Grid Net, and as the ecosystem delivers the equipment then they can make a choice. It’s hard to predict the future.
Q). You’ve been in the private sector before, what are some of the key differences to working at a utility? Do you prefer one over the other?
AC: I was Microsoft in the pre-IPO days, Borland just after its IPO, four startups, one on Internet technology and three on telecom between 1990 to 2003. I have experienced the gamut. I’ve done the whole thing from early stage, from three guys in an office to a huge company. I love building things, building products, markets, ecosystems, companies. I built the first smart grid in Austin, with 1 million consumers, and 43,000 businesses, and I have learned and discovered and created a bunch of things. Grid Net has been through a similar journey. I think we are a match made in heaven.
Related research on GigaOM Pro:
Biggest Opportunities in the Smart Grid
Report: IT and Networking Issues for the Electric Vehicle Market
Trilliant's All-In-One Smart Grid Network
Jeff St. John - smart grid
Smart meter wireless networking company Trilliant bought long-range wireless provider SkyPilot Networks last May with the goal of bringing all three kinds of networks in-house. On Tuesday, it announced its new bridge products that can link Trilliant's low-power wireless LANs with its SkyPilot-based, high speed mesh and point-to-point WANs, at latencies low enough to run substation and distribution grid gear as well, according to Eric Miller, senior vice president of solutions. While Trilliant has only a few utility clients, including Canadian utility Milton Hydro, using both LAN and WAN networks right now, Miller said the company intends to go forward selling them as a package.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Trilliant has been around since 1985, but refocused on the smart grid about six years ago, a goal for which it has since raised about $40 million in VC financing. Its biggest client is Ontario, Canada utility Hydro One, which is using Trilliant to create a neighborhood area-network for some 800,000 meters installed, out of an estimated 1.1 million due by the end of next year. (Hydro One isn't using WAN from Trilliant, since it already chose chosen Canadian WiMAX network provider Redline Communications for its WAN needs, Miller noted).
All in all, Trilliant has connected more than a million smart grid devices — about the same as rival Silver Spring Networks, though the latter company has a bigger backlog, about seven times the VC cash, and a lot more media attention. The two also differ in key ways, such as Silver Spring's choice of 900-megahertz proprietary radios — industry standard in the talking meter business — with Internet protocol for networking, versus Trilliant's choice of 2.4-gigahertz wireless based on the 802.15.4 protocol underlying ZigBee, but with a modified IP-based networking architecture.
Both companies' networks are built to "mesh" lots of meters' radios together, to pass signals from one another in multiple paths to neighborhood-wide concentrator units that hook up with backhaul networks. Most utilities use public cellular or self-built fiber, copper and radio networks for backhaul nowadays. The utility-owned connections generally quit at major substations, however, leaving the grid between them and their customers dark. Cellular offers coverage for that gap, but not everywhere — and not at prices and quality of service levels that a utility can control. Trilliant offers to give utilities control and ownership over both, Miller said.
The latter point is particularly important to utilities, since most make money by asking regulators to approve rate increases to pay for capital expenses on their customers' behalf. Operating expenses, like monthly rents paid to a cellular carrier, are harder for utilities to justify. Miller argued that Trilliant's combo-network offering could pay itself off almost immediately in the savings utilities would find by firing their cellular carrier and/or replacing worn-out telephone lines and radios.
Trilliant can also offer better service, Miller said, down to splitting up the network into secure and separate tiers, guaranteeing super-fast channels for substation switches and reserving a slow trickle for hourly smart meter data — something Miller said cellular carriers would be hard-pressed to offer. It will be interesting to see the response from smart-grid targeted carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Vodafone, BT (formerly British Telecom) and others, as well as startups like SmartSynch that have built their smart meter businesses on cellular. Smart meters don't generate a ton of data, which means cellular carriers might not see a big upside to giving utilities expensive options like dedicated channels, Ben Schuman, analyst for Pacific Crest Securities, noted – "You need very specific service level agreements to ensure mission-critical service delivery, at very low price points," he said.
What about Trilliant's promise of a network fast enough to run the hardware of the grid itself (all that mission critical gear that ensures the grid doesn’t blow up)? There’s variety of companies offering similar services. Qualcomm offers a turnkey wireless service that does some grid gear control work for Swiss electrical equipment giant ABB, and it and fellow grid giant Siemens have multiple partnerships with cellular providers. Both "big five" smart meter maker Sensus and smart grid networking startup Arcadian Networks offer licensed spectrum for smart grid needs, which could give them a leg up in promising utilities that they'll get critical messages through.
Tropos Networks, a municipal WiFi company that's more recently focused on the smart grid, says it can offer capabilities similar to those Trilliant offers, and Silver Spring has been approved by Siemens for some substation gear networking. Of course, reliability and durability are also key factors when it comes to sticking lots of radios on electrical poles right next to major electromagnetic fields.
Then there's WiMAX. WiMAX could offer the closest comparison to Trilliant's SkyPilot technology, as far as its breadth of potential functions. Trilliant's WAN can offer bandwidth of some 54 megabits-per-second, and latencies as low as 10 milliseconds, Miller said — nicely comparable to WiMAX.
Grid Net, a company that's built software for WiMAX-enabled meters, along with a network that could control substation switches and support IP security cameras and utility crew’s mapping consoles in the field. General Electric and Alvarion are offering WiMAX gear to utilities such as Texas's CenterPoint Energy and New England's National Grid.
But WiMAX is also expensive, and Miller said Trilliant could offer a network at one-third to one-tenth the price, though that difference is bound to shrink as WiMAX chips get cheaper. Still, the few clients now using Trilliant's WAN already had been working with SkyPilot when it was acquired, Miller said, and whether more choose future-forward functionality over the cheaper way to do what's needed in the short term may well determine the fate of Trilliant's new business model.
One of Trilliant's main selling points could be its all-in-one system. Smart grid analyst Jesse Berst explained it as "A company that can offer a single console and guaranteed plug-and-play integration would have an advantage in convenience and speed of installation.” Schuman told us he expects a lot more mergers and acquisitions amongst smart grid communications and networking providers to give utilities a single network to operate their smart grid.
Digital Lumens Takes a Cue from Smart Grid Tech for LEDs
Josie Garthwaite - Startups
“We’ve merged together LEDs with networking software,” Pincince explained. He said the company has taken a “very, very energy efficient fixture,” and added “local intelligence.” Each fixture has an on-board computer and mesh networking capabilities, allowing the system to adjust to variables such as whether daylighting is available, the state of a neighboring fixture or if a particular work area or machine needs to be illuminated at a set time. The system can also be programmed, and provide data about usage and occupancy to facility managers through Digital Lumens’ energy management system, dubbed “LightRules.” According to Digital Lumens’ release this morning, LightRules can also be used to respond to demand response calls and can be integrated with third-party systems, such as carbon accounting software.
Digital Lumens started out under the name GroomLED Inc., and shared space in its early days with Salem, Mass.-based efficiency services provider Groom Energy. As Groom explains in this recent blog post, it recruited a small team for the Digital Lumens venture with the goal of developing LED-based lighting systems meeting the high-wattage needs of its commercial and industrial customers. Early LED systems, “were burdened with bad design DNA,” basically reflective metal shaped around lamps and ballasts, writes Groom. The type of system Groom wanted to see, however, called for an interdisciplinary team that could simultaneously consider “optics, thermal, mechanics, power and control. It’s more like designing a computer than metal bending.”
According to Pincince, while Digital Lumens has always been a “completely separate company,” that early connection with Groom helped Digital Lumens understand its potential future customers. The company has raised $11.3 million so far from investors including Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Stata Venture Partners. CEO Tom Pincince said in an interview with us that the company is now pursuing government funding in hopes of gaining “access to capital as well as access to relationships.”
According to Pincince, the startup has plenty of financing for its current growth plan, which includes doubling in size to 30 people by year’s end (mostly in Boston, with some hires elsewhere in the U.S. depending on where customers are located). Pincince said the company “might consider” taking on additional financing if the company gains more traction.
Digital Lumens is targeting customers with facilities averaging a quarter of a million to 1 million square feet, paying about a dollar per square foot to light their facilities each year. These are facilities, said Pincince, that don’t have “a lot of moving parts in terms of reducing their operating expenses.” In other words, lighting is one of few areas where they can take out a big chunk of costs, and that’s where Digital Lumens comes in. According to Pincince, Digital Lumens can cut those costs to 10 cents per square foot. “You can’t do that with a dumb fixture and an expensive controls system,” said Pincince. The system has to be “built from the ground up.”
At this point Digital Lumens, which contracts its manufacturing to a company in China, has 16 different trials under way, but only one purchase order. Pincince declined to disclose the customer or specify size of the order, but said a “typical” purchase order would come to about half a million dollars. Digital Lumens has a lot riding on those other 15 trials, and Pincince said the company’s main focus right now is working with a small, emerging group of partners (partly in the interest of offering a shared-savings model to help reduce or eliminate customers’ upfront costs), and making,”our first customers and first prospects as happy as possible.” They each have “tens if not hundreds of facilities,” said Pincince, and the hope is to retrofit all of their facilities over time.
Related research on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):
Opportunities in LED Solid-State Lighting
Grid Net Scores Austin Energy CIO for Chief Strategist
Katie Fehrenbacher - smart grid
Carvallo is known for helping Austin Energy deploy one of the first smart grid networks in the U.S., and says he originally coined the term “smart grid” back in April 2007. Before he joined Austin Energy to lead its smart grid efforts he was an exec at a variety of start-ups and larger tech firms including Philips Electronics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Borland and Carvallo started his career as a product manager for Microsoft. So returning to the world of Silicon Valley and technology isn’t such a stretch.
Carvallo’s addition to Grid Net packs a lot of punch. While Grid Net has been making strides as of late, the startup still has a limited number of utility customers and deployments. Grid Net officially launched itself just last October, unveiling its software product and announcing Australian utility customer SP AusNet, as well as a whole host of partners including GE, Motorola, Cisco, Intel, and WiMAX service provider Clearwire. Grid Net has also been reported to be working on pilots with American utilities American Electric Power, and Consumers Energy.
Carvallo’s addition to the startup, more than anything, will help Grid Net convince utility customers that the wireless standard WiMAX could be a good option for their smart grid networks. Carvallo tells us in a phone interview (full Q&A here) that he will be focused on educating his utility peers on Grid Net and WiMAX. For those of you not familiar with WiMAX, it's a high-speed wireless technology that service providers are using for the next generation of broadband services. It competes with a high-speed wireless technology being deployed by cell phone companies called Long Term Evolution, or LTE. But for the smart grid, WiMAX can offer utilities a lot of bandwidth and could also ultimately be really cheap because it's an open standard with a growing ecosystem of large manufacturing partners like GE, Motorola and Intel.
Interest in a WiMAX-enabled smart grid has been gaining over the past couple of months. Earlier this month Arcadian Networks, a startup that owns licensed 700-megahertz spectrum across a swath of the American heartland and is selling smart grid services to utilities, told us it had recently started selling a WiMAX-enabled gateway device. Sprint wants utilities to eventually use the WiMAX network it's building in partnership with Clearwire for smart grid applications. Utilities like Texas's CenterPoint Energy, New England's National Grid and San Diego Gas & Electric have been testing and looking into deploying WiMAX smart grid networks.
It still remains to be seen to what extent utilities will embrace WiMAX for the smart grid. Carvallo told us in an interview that Grid Net will be looking to roll out other services based on broadband technology like possibly broadband over powerlines and fiber. But given WiMAX is Grid Net’s first (and only for now) offering, Grid Net execs, including Carvallo, are placing a lot of their chips on the WiMAX smart grid bet.
FCC Broadband Plan Goal: Use Broadband to Manage Energy Consumption
Katie Fehrenbacher - Green IT
Those that live their lives around broadband (consider the Earth2Tech crew to be among ‘em) have been eagerly awaiting the unveiling of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan, which it plans to officially release to Congress on Tuesday. The FCC, which is headed by Chairman Julius Genachowski and has been unusually bullish on promoting broadband and Internet innovation, on Monday gave a sneak peek of what it plans to release tomorrow, including specific recommendations and goals for consumer energy data and the smart grid. According to the executive summary of the National Broadband Plan, one of the FCC’s six long term goals for broadband is:
To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.
In addition, the executive summary gives three recommendations on the intersection of energy and broadband: The U.S. should modernize the electrical grid “with broadband, making it more reliable and efficient,” use broadband to improve the energy efficiency and environmental impact of the information technology industry, and leverage broadband to unleash “energy innovation in homes and buildings by making energy data readily accessible by consumers.”
The FCC’s attention to making consumer energy data readily available and accessible will warm the hearts of the variety of startups and web firms looking to build businesses and innovation around home energy data. Just this morning wireless energy management startup People Power released its open source-based software developer's kit. Internet giants Google and Microsoft have also released software kits for their web energy management tools to developers to try to build an ecosystem around home energy application innovation. Earlier this month Google even released an open API for its energy tool PowerMeter. (I’ll be moderating a discussion between Google’s Ed Lu and Microsoft’s Troy Batterberry at our Green:Net Conference on April 29 in San Francisco).
The notion for how to encourage (or force) utilities to provide energy data to consumers, and at what frequency, is being hotly debated by the California Public Utilities Commission, tech vendors and utilities. The California Public Utilities Commission said back in December that Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric should give their customers — and approved third parties, which could include Google, Microsoft or other makers of energy data portals — access to smart meter data that the utilities have collected in their back office servers by the end of 2010.
By the end of 2011, the CPUC wants the big investor-owned utilities to provide customers and approved third parties with "near real time" data from smart meters. Given that smart meters typically send their data back to utility offices in 15-minute to hourly increments and send it back to web portals at least a day later, getting real-time data to customers could require turning on the so-called "home area network" connections that link smart meters to in-home devices via wireless networks.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly how the FCC plans to meet that long term goal of enabling consumers to gain access to real time energy data, but we’ll likely to hear more when the plan is announced tomorrow. In January the FCC new Energy and Environmental Director, Nick Sinai, said that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan could look at how to reward states and utilities with strong data access policies (like California and Pennsylvania) in its grants and loan programs, and it could look at stronger moves as well, such as "national energy data accessibility legislation."
Sinai said that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan could also look at how to promote open standards and commercial networks, how to use policies to encourage utilities to provide their customers with real-time open access to energy data and potential ways to use federal spectrum bands for utilities' smart grid deployments. More specific topics that could be covered in the recommendations could include, “how to remove impediments and disincentives to using commercial networks,” and "exploring ways to encourage private networks built by utilities to operate in the same band, in order to drive down costs, and to drive open, non-proprietary standards," said Sinai. The FCC could also be looking at working with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to look at available federal spectrum bands for the smart grid.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment