Search Results for: demand response

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/13/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/01/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 09/30/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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The Electricity 2.0 revolution has begun

Smart meter projects globally

This is a map of current smart meter/smart grid projects globally overlaid on Google maps.
Screenshot credit Me(!)

I wrote my first Greenmonk post about Smart Grids and Demand Response back in April 2008 and followed up with a few more in the next few weeks including one in June 2008 where I said the electrical distribution system needed to be more like the Internet. Those posts were extremely cutting edge at the time but the world has caught up considerably in the last 18 months due in no small part to the election of Barack Obama and the focus on energy efficiency in his stimulus package!

Under Obama’s administration the US Dept of Energy announced in June of this year the rules for $3.9billion in Smart Grid stimulus grants. The first winners of $3.9 billion in smart grid stimulus grants will be announced in mid-November according to DOE deputy press secretary Jen Stutsman.

In a very positive move earlier this week, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu endorsed the importance of Demand Response as part of the solution when he said that electricity costs should move to reflect demand. Secretary Chu went further though arguing for the kind of automated Demand Response we have proposed here on GreenMonk when he said:

“Price signals do matter, but you can’t just simply use a price signal,” Chu said. “You really have to make it very easy to save energy.”

Consumers need to have a very simple system that will provide them with specific information about their energy use and they should be able to adjust their appliances so that they run mostly during non-peak energy hours

Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril announced last week that mass market home energy management is three years away. Obviously, being the CEO of a company in the space, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But looking at the slew of announcements which came out of the Gridweek conference (see below) it is hard to fault his optimism.

And just yesterday U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) presented for public comment a major new report on Smart Grid interoperability standards. The approximately 90-page document [pdf] identifies about 80 initial standards that will enable the vast number of interconnected devices and systems that will make up the US Smart Grid to communicate and work with each other.

You know that the administration is taking Smart Grids seriously when the Commerce Secretary presents for public comment a report on standards!

This week saw the GridWeek conference happening in Washington DC and with it a massive slew of Smart Grid related news. I’ll try to do a quick round-up of the main stories:

Partnerships

Acquisitions

Smart Cities

Launch

Other Announcements

With finance, administration backing and so many announcements (many of which are worthy of blog posts in their own right) there is no doubt but that the Smart Grid train has well and truly left the station. There are still a significant number of issues to be addressed by companies involved in the Smart Grid space. Some companies will founder, some deployments will fail (esp as utilities are notoriously bad at customer communications!) but there is no doubt that finally the Electricity 2.0 revolution has begun – there’s no turning back now.

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GreenMonk news roundup 09/24/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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IBM’s Drew Clark on electricity, water and trends in sustainability

I had the good fortune to have a chat with IBM Director of Strategy Drew Clark recently. We had a great talk covering how to get noticed by the IBM Venture Capital group, water and energy projects and trends in sustainability globally.

We even speculated on the likelihood of demand response systems being rolled out for water management.

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Not so Smart Grids, doomed to fail?

Command and control

Photo credit Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan in Iraq

I was invited by James McClelland and Maureen Coveney to participate in a panel at SAP’s Sapphire conference earlier this year discussing Smart Grids.

One of the key points I made was that utilities are not used to having to deal with customers. The only real interactions utilities have with customers are 1) sending out bills and 2) when the power goes and customers ring up to complain. It is highly unusual to have a utility company poll its customers when rolling out a new product, for example (for that matter, when was the last time your utility rolled out a new product?).

With the requirement to roll-out smart grids and the increasing empowerment of customers using web 2.0 technologies, for example, utilities are now going to have to learn to listen to their customers very quickly. Any roll-out of demand response programs which doesn’t take customer concerns into account is almost certain to run into serious difficulties. I have heard several utilities talk about using smart grids to come into customers houses and turn down their air conditioning at times of peak demand. Wrong! This kind of message will not sell easily.

A recent example of a not-so-smart grid was highlighted by 3News in New Zealand recently when they reported that the smart grids being rolled out there were ones where:

the benefits from smart meters almost entirely accrue to the retailer… Consumers will end up paying for meters that provide them with minimal benefits

Utilities are going to have to radically change how they deal with their customers, and quickly or they risk having spectacular failures when they launch their smart grid initiatives!

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/18/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Rich Lechner on Smart Transport June 09

I talked to Rich Lechner, IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment, the other day about the global problem of getting transportation right. According to Rich, in the US alone, congested roadways cost about $78bn per year so this is very much an economic as well as a sustainability-related issue!

We had a wide-ranging conversation about all kinds of solutions, including using demand response to manage traffic flows!

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GreenMonk news roundup 05/05/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.