“So, by embedding privacy into the design of the smart grid you will be able to grow your smart grid in a way that attracts more consumers to it and that’s the win-win proposition of this.” Dr Ann Cavoukian in this Smart Grids Heavy Hitter interview
By Tom Raftery
– August 26, 2010
I was lucky enough recently to meet Jose Iglesias, the guy spearheading Symantec’s sustainability efforts. I wrote the interview up over on Monkchips, but much of the content belongs here too. I like Symantec’s clear focus on energy. While others are broadening their sustainability story, Symantec is doubling down on managing energy more effectively, with [...]
By monkchips
– July 23, 2010
GE published a U.S. Consumer Impressions of the Smart Grid [pdf] survey* recently. I spoke to the general manager of Metering and Sensing Systems for GE’s Digital Energy business, Luke Clemente about the survey and he told me that the main points of the survey were: 96% of Americans who are familiar with the smart [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 22, 2010
Photo credit urbanfeel One of the key tenets of a Smart Grid is that you have real-time, two-way communications between the consumer and the utility company. To enable this a communications infrastructure needs to be rolled out. Before that can happen though, we need to examine the different communications protocols to find the most suitable [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 19, 2010
Photo credit XcBiker And here are this week’s Green Numbers: Smart Grids GE announces $200M Smart Grid challange GE wants to spark a revolution in the way we create and distribute electricity, and seizing on a critical underfunding of grid investments by the U.S. government (a paltry $3.4 billion) the 2nd largest company in the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 16, 2010
Photo credit Lee Jordan We had a really interesting Smart Grid related conversation with a company called Arqiva the other day. I hadn’t heard of Arqiva before but they are quite a significant player in communications infrastructure. They own or have exclusive marketing rights for 16,000 communication masts in UK – what they call vertical [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 24, 2010
Photo credit Lee Jordan Jaymi Heimbuch contacted me recently to ask if I’d agree to be interviewed for a TreeHugger article she was planning to write on Smart Grids. “Love to”, I said. Jaymi sent on the questions, I replied and today she posted the interview on TreeHugger. Here are the questions and my answers: [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 15, 2010
Greenmonk spends most of its time researching smart grid approaches and deployments. I hired Tom Raftery largely because of his visionary take on the future of energy networks – Electricity 2.0. So you can imagine how happy I am that smart grid stimulus funds are being aggressively spent… on antivirus and encryption software. Yay – [...]
By monkchips
– May 26, 2010
Photo credit Tom Raftery (Me!) Sunspec.org is an alliance of renewable industry companies whose aim is to define communication standards data monitoring for the solar power industry. Up until now there haven’t been any standards agreed around data communication in the solar power industry which added huge cost and complexity to the monitoring and management [...]
By Tom Raftery
– May 6, 2010
Jon Wellinghoff is the Chairman of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – the FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. I recorded an interview with Jon a few weeks back. The resulting video was too good to reduce to a single piece, so I [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 29, 2010
We had a really solid briefing with Convergys today. The firm sells software and services to telcos and utilities for customer care and billing – it has 80k employees worldwide, 550+ clients, and $3bn in revenue. According to Greenmonk research most utilities are failing to understand the the need to put the customer right at the [...]
By monkchips
– April 26, 2010
One of our prospects asked about relevant Greenmonk research in her space- that is: utility company customer care and billing. So Tom compiled a few links and fired them over. It seems to me though that you might also find the roundup interesting. So here are some links showing you the kind of thing Greenmonk [...]
By monkchips
– April 16, 2010
In the Smart Grid Heavy Hitters video interview series I have been publishing here on GreenMonk, one of the questions I ask all interviewees is, “What is a Smart Grid?” Almost all the interviewees talk about an infrastructure capable of full end-to-end, two-way communications. That is, communication from utilities down to the appliance level in-home, [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 16, 2010
Jon Wellinghoff is the Chairman of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – the FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. As such, the FERC was the agency which Google Energy applied to for its licence to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market, [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 15, 2010
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Dr Hugo Niesling of Wattpic Energia. Wattpic are based in Barcelona and while their main product is photovoltaic trackers, they do a lot of research into demand response technologies and have a microgrid near Girona which has been operating successfully off-grid [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 14, 2010
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Daniel Cumming of Schneider Electric. Schneider are one of the world’s oldest and largest companies in the energy space having been founded in 1836 (yes 18!) and with revenues of €15.79bn in 2009 [PDF]. We chatted about two of Schneider’s offerings [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 13, 2010
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Pascal Julienne, President & EMEA Director of BPL Global. BPL Global, who have been making smart grid software since 2005 produce a smart grid platform for utilities and have rolled out their solution to First Energy (one of the largest utilities [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 13, 2010
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Joost Brinkman of the Amsterdam Smart City project. We talked about the project, which is still very much in the planning stages yet, but has the lofty ambition to help Amsterdam reduce its CO2 emissions 40% below its 1990 baseline by [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 9, 2010
Ahmad Faruqui is a principal with the Brattle Group and one of the US’ foremost experts on Smart Grids. I asked him to come on the Heavy Hitters show and we had a fascinating chat. We talked about: Ahmad’s definition of a Smart Grid People seeing higher utility bills as a result of the rollout [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 8, 2010
We have pointed to the ongoing convergence of wireless communications and smart grids before, for example in this video about Tropos Networks and in Tom’s stump pitch on sustainability and mobility, but some news from this week throws the trend into stark relief. Carbon Trust investments, the VC arm of a non-profit organisation working to [...]
By monkchips
– April 8, 2010
I talked to several of the exhibitors at the Smart Grids Europe 2010 conference in Amsterdam last week. Amongst them was Mary Ann Tillman of Convergys. Convergys are a large US company with 75,000 employees in over 70 countries and revenues in 2009 over $3bn. Convergys business was traditionally customer information (billing) software for mobile [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 7, 2010
I attended the Smart Grids Europe Conference 2010 in Amsterdam last week. One of the people displaying there was Thomas Joergensen of TrickleStar. TrickleStar are not a Smart Grid company per se, what they offer instead are devices to cut down on energy consumption in the home. As such, their clients are utility companies who [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 7, 2010
Photo credit mckaysavage Despite a lot of talk and some high profile trials the day we have ubiquitous full Smart Grids is still a long way off. I attended the Smart Grids Europe conference in Amsterdam this week. It was a great conference, I met a ton of interesting people and had some fascinating conversations. [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 1, 2010
eMeter provide software for utilities who are rolling out Smart Grids to help with Meter Data Management and real-time pricing visibility. Chris King is their Chief Regulatory Officer and he and I had a great chat recently about Smart Grids. We talked about: Chris and eMeter’s definition of a Smart Grid Why eMeter need a [...]
By Tom Raftery
– March 25, 2010
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