By Amy Hsuan The nation’s electric power industry, dating back to the 19th century, is in the early phases of an unprecedented change. With new, renewable resources coming online and commercial users searching for new modes of efficiency, the underlying infrastructure that has served the power needs of the United States for the better part [...]

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With the world at large racing ahead to find innovative solutions to increase energy efficiency, including the push for smart grid technologies, will today’s workforce keep pace?

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Consultant company KEMA published a white paper in 2008 that predicted that federal and state smart grid incentives of $16B would be leveraged by a factor of four, resulting in the creation of some 280,000 new smart grid jobs, roughly half of which will be permanent. While the spending levels to date have not quite [...]

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Duke Energy’s CEO, Jim Rogers, imagines utilities like Duke transforming their business models so that they become analogous to those of Amazon.com’s and eBay’s. Just as Amazon sells discounted books via the popular Kindle e-reader, Rogers envisions a utility, backed up by a smarter grid, that pitches energy efficient products to its customers.

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Imagine this scenario. You pull into the parking lot at work. After locking up your car, you connect up to the meter for that parking space and swipe a card that identifies you and confirms your default charging profile which includes such preferences as what time you generally leave work, how much of your battery charge you are willing to make available, how many miles you generally travel after work, and such. The power company restores more than enough of your battery charge in time for you to leave. It also issues you a credit for the use of your car’s storage capacity, which exceeds the cost of the power returned, ensuring that you make a small profit on the transaction. Welcome to the world of V2G.

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Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, headlined a conference in San Francisco today, announcing three major initiatives that GE is committing to, in order to advance their Ecomagination project.  GE is planning to expand further into the clean tech world, and to drive innovation around the smart grid, energy efficiency, renewables, and electric vehicles. Most significantly, [...]

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GE’s ecomagination program–out of the blue two months ago–became a sponsor of the Bay Area Green Business Meetup Group, which I co-chair with the help of 3P’s founder, Nick Aster. It’s not often that sponsors fall from the sky with unsolicited ad dollars. Through a partnership with Meetup.com, GE is sponsoring not just our Meetup [...]

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The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently released a study that found 850 utilities across the United States now offer some form of green energy program. In 2009, green energy sales by electric utilities exceeded 6 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or approximately 5% of total kWh consumption. The municipal electric utility Austin Energy was the top [...]

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Over the past couple of years, the hype around the coming smart grid and how it would help lower energy consumption, provide better electrical service and incorporate renewable energy sources into the nation’s electrical grid, reached a fever pitch. But once the rubber started hitting the road, there were hiccups. They started in Bakersfield, Calif., [...]

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The rollout of the highly touted Smart Grid ran into another buzz saw this week, this time in Texas, when  hundreds of consumers showed up at a town hall meeting, and the Grand Prairie City Hall, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, complaining that their recently installed wireless Smart Meters were responsible for higher electric bills. [...]

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A new report from research and consulting firm Zpryme describes the growing field of smart appliances as a tremendous market opportunity. It estimates that the global household smart appliance market will grow from $3.06 billion to $15.12 billion over the next five years. In 2015, the global market size for smart washers and smart refrigerators [...]

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Just imagine if we were only now building our first electric infrastructure. Of course that would mean that we’d be decades behind our other modern counterparts. But it would also mean that we’d be in a position to build it using the very latest and best technology. That is exactly the position China is in [...]

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Smart metering, a key element of the so-called Smart Grid, has been touted as a great bright hope that will enable residential electric customers to cut their usage, thereby reducing greenhouse gases as well as their monthly bills. By providing immediate feedback to customers as to how much power they are using, what their annual [...]

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by Kurt McCulloch When I was 18 years old, I voluntarily sequestered myself for nine-months on a narrow strip of rugged volcanic coastline on a tiny island in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. For almost a year, I worked, slept, ate, and socialized inside an area bounded by mountains and the sea. Everything [...]

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Where Were the Electric Utilities on Cyber Monday? I post this question drawing upon the following two data-points: 1. Almost 100 million Americans (certainly all of whom are electric utility customers) shopped via the Internet on Cyber Monday, the online retail event following Black Friday. 2. ALL of the top 15 products that consumers searched [...]

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Today marks the start of UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, or COP15 as it’s widely known. A culmination of years of planning, months of lobbying by pressure groups such as those coordinated by TckTckTck. There’s a lot of anticipation and speculation as to what’s going to happen. Not all of it optimistic. While the [...]

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“95.6% of households are willing to change their energy consumption behavior to save money on their energy costs.” This finding comes from the 2009 Nielsen Energy Audit. “This survey strongly suggests the timing is right for utilities to engage their customers with green marketing initiatives,” explains Jonathan Drost, Nielsen Account Executive-Utilities. “The survey points to utility customers being driven by the desire to lower their costs and to have increased control of their energy costs.”

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In the mid-1990’s, while serving as the General Marketing Manager for Georgia Power, I had the honor of managing the team of exceptionally bright people that designed an industry-pioneering meter-linked, integrated real time pricing/demand side management program. Today, I understand this legacy system now bills $2 billion annually on the Southern Company system, a utility [...]

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Technology works best when it’s least intrusive and does the heavy lifting for you. Apple understands this. And so, it seems, does EcoFactor, the winner of the recent Clean Tech Open. What it does behind the scenes is fairly complex, but for the user, easy and out of the way: It keeps your home at [...]

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The smart grid is coming! And so are (again, finally) electric cars! Want to know how this makes Ted Craver, the president and CEO of electric power generator and distributor Edition International, feel? Excited. And scared. “We’re looking at the confluence of public policy, environmental issues writ large, and enabling technologies that are really going [...]

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There are different estimates and projections regarding when, and if, electric vehicles (EVs) will transform our transportation infrastructure, but one thing seems certain: carmakers won’t be able to transform the infrastructure on their own. Last month I attended a forum presented by Ford in which it previewed its upcoming electric vehicles—the battery electric (BEV) Transit [...]

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Which comes first, the smart grid or smart-energy appliances, or does it matter? Whirlpool Corporation says it will produce 1 million smart-energy-grid compatible dryers by the end of 2011, continuing the company’s “legacy of innovation and leadership.” One niggling wrinkle about the announcement is whether the Benton Harbor, MI company would take this step on [...]

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As a sign of growing corporate support to climate change legislation, a string of companies have left the chamber in recent weeks.  Exelon, one of the largest utilities in the US and the third to leave the Chamber, made the announcement Monday. The Chicago-based company sells electricity and gas in four states and is the [...]

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Competition among companies that can provide reliable, scalable– and secure– smart meters, automation and control systems has grown to be pretty fierce in recent years, even more so lately given the $11 billion allocated in the federal government’s American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Youngish, entrepreneurial IT-driven companies such as Echelon, Itron, and Silver Spring Networks [...]

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It may not have made as many waves as the Michael Jackson story, but last week, after the House passed the cap-and-trade bill, the media response was overwhelming. Not that anyone should be surprised. This is a huge issue. However, it seemed that much of the earliest coverage stirred up an awful lot of hostility [...]

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The wonder of the Internet – its ability to provide both instant and constant access to data – is merging with our electricity meters and with the appliances inside our homes as the vision of the new, improved, smart grid comes into focus. But, just as with the dawn of the Internet, the smart meter [...]

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The much ballyhooed smart grid might be buoyed by the stimulus bill, which appropriates $4.5 billion in direct spending to modernize the electricity grid with smart-grid technologies (part of the $11 overall for spending related to the smart grid), but that doesn’t mean there’s a clear, easy path to smartening up the grid. That was [...]

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It’s been said that Google, with it’s deep interest in energy technology across many sectors, will benefit greatly from the recently passed Stimulus Bill, with $11 Billion to be invested in smart grid technology. But it may be the public and the environment that will benefit the most. Google has recently begun testing PowerMeter, a [...]

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I was lucky enough to see Al Gore at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. Lucky because after all he is the Goreacle, but if you could invite anyone to your post-election victory party, wouldn’t Al be at the top of your list? This year’s “Web Meets World” theme brought together Internet-industry [...]

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