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
EDSA are an interesting company. They are 25 years old, they are privately held and they focus on power analytics. I had an opportunity to have EDSA’s CTO, Kevin Meagher, on the show so I jumped at it to find out more about their smart grid solutions for micro-grid integration. Kevin and I had a [...]
By Tom Raftery
– March 18, 2010
In this, the fifth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to the CEO of Tropos Networks, Tom Ayers. Tropos develop wireless broadband networks for Smart Grid applications and offer complete network management, as well as enhanced security features. Tropos is the only wireless broadband network provider with FIPS 140-2 certification. Tom and [...]
By Tom Raftery
– March 11, 2010
This is the third of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the CTO of Silver Springs Networks, Raj Vaswani. It was a great interview – in it we talked about: Raj’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid The fact that, to-date Smart Grids are quite notional How [...]
By Tom Raftery
– February 25, 2010
In this, the second of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to SAP’s Head of Industry Business Unit for Utilities, Stefan Engelhardt. It was a great interview – in it we talked about: Stefan’s definition of a Smart Grid The benefits of Smart Grids to both the utilities and the customers of the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– February 18, 2010
I decided to run a series of interviews with people deeply involved in the Smart Grid space. I’m calling it the Smart Grid Heavy Hitters series. I will publish a new interview every Thursday until I run out of interviewees (or out of energy – poor pun intended, sorry!). In this, the first of my [...]
By Tom Raftery
– February 11, 2010
Photo credit Hypergurl – Tanya Ann I wrote a post a couple of days ago asking the question How long until all devices which consume water have networked flow meters? after talking to Oracle VP Industry Strategy, Guerry Waters about Oracle’s recently released “Testing the Water: Smart Metering for Water Utilities” study. Having put the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– January 21, 2010
Just before Christmas I had a chat with Ford’s head of battery electric vehicle applications, Greg Frenette. We discussed how Ford has been working with utilities and industry organisations to ready its electric vehicles for deep integration into smart grids. It was fascinating for me to see just how far Ford have proceeded with their [...]
By Tom Raftery
– January 13, 2010
Photo credit armandoalves I saw a report on the Green Data Center Blog today that a new industry group called GreenTouch has been formed with the express aim of reducing the amount of energy communications networks (including the Internet) use. In fact their Global Mission is to, by 2015: deliver the architecture, specifications and roadmap [...]
By Tom Raftery
– January 12, 2010
(Lack of) Sustainability in the mobile phone industry View more documents from Tom Raftery. I realised recently that although I have referred to the talk I gave in Barcelona on Mobile Sustainability (for the Mobile 2.0 conference) in a couple of posts I never talked about the talk directly here, so now it is time [...]
By Tom Raftery
– November 8, 2009
Photo credit Ian Muttoo Guido Bartels is General Manager of IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities Industry. Guido leads IBM’s corporate initiative around building an ‘Intelligent Utility Network,’ IBM’s portfolio of offerings and capabilities for the Smart Grid. Guido is also a member of the Electricity Advisory Committee at Department of Energy, an organization whose mission [...]
By Tom Raftery
– November 6, 2009
Photo credit Barack Obama President Barack Obama was in Florida on Tuesday this week for the official opening of Florida Power and Light’s new solar energy power plant. The 90,000+ solar panel plant, which has been installed across 180 acres of the 5,000 acre FPL property, is expected to generate 25MW of clean electricity (enough [...]
By Tom Raftery
– October 30, 2009
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