Tendril, UISOL, PJM Partnership Could Benefit Residential Consumers

Managing residential electricity demand and controlling load balances is an increasing problem for PJM Interconnection, North America's largest power grid, especially during extreme weather events and peak demand times.

Now Tendril, an energy platform company we've been tracking here at The Green Skeptic, is partnering with Utility Integration Solutions, Inc. (UISOL), a provider of demand response management and automation systems, on what they call a "Price Response Demand" demo project for PJM.

"This real-world demonstration will show the feasibility and ease with which residential customers can reduce their energy consumption in response to wholesale price signals that reflect grid conditions," according to Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck. "It will also enable utilities to aggregate Demand Response in consumers' homes for better load control, increased efficiency and additional savings."

The project combines Tendril's Connect platform with UISOL’s Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) price server to allow PJM to test a near real-time program for price response and better manage electricity demand.

If it works, residential consumers will be able to have a better handle on the cost of energy used in their homes and utilities will be able to better manage load balances that can lead to brown-outs or even black-outs during peak usage events.

This latest announcement comes on the heals of Tendril's partnerships with ThinkEco, creators of the "modlet" plug-load management device, and Whirlpool on smart home appliances.

The company also launched Tendril Energize, which they call "the first ever application suite based on proven behavioral science techniques" to provide "persistent consumer engagement in home energy performance."

Tendril and UISOL are demonstrating their PJM project at DistribuTECH 2011 this week in San Diego.

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The Green Skeptic’s "Rational Approach to Cleantech" on Competitive Futures PodCast

I sat down yesterday with Eric Garland to explain my opinions on cleantech, green, and more. Here's what Eric had to say on Competitive Futures:

"With a philosophy straight from the European Enlightenment and with credentials from the heart of the environmental movement, Scott Edward Anderson is a rare voice amongst the crowd of green economy hypesters and cynics. In a style that strongly recalls our own approach to holistic, data-based, rational analysis of the future, Scott advises companies, governments and investors on how to think about cleantech with all the complexity and cold logic that it deserves.

"In this edition of the Competitive Futures Podcast, Scott shoots a hole in most of the "green" technologies that are supposed to save us, tells us why China is rapidly outpacing the West on cleantech investments, and why fixing 100 year old buildings is just as important as adopting brand new, shiny silver, nanotech-injected technology when it comes to the long-term future of our energy-efficient, green and clean 21st century economy."

New Energy Symposium 2010

This year's New Energy Symposium took place last week at the New York Academy of Sciences' lush office and conference space at the World Trade Center in New York.

Co-hosted by the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering's (CNSE) Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Center (E2TAC), along with New Energy New York, a consortium of New York State-based energy technology organizations, the two day event featured panelists from industry and government, as well as investors and academic institutions, along with over two dozen presenting companies.

More than one jeremiad was tossed out by the speakers. Most agreed that the time is now to seed the opportunity and not cede it to other countries (China and India were among those cited).

As Dr. Pradeep Haldar, director of E2TAC and head of the Nanoengineering Constellation at University of Albany's CNSE, reminded the attendees, "We are falling behind the rest of the world by $240-260 million in terms of investment in cleantech."

Several presenting companies hope to get a piece of that investment pie and hope that it grows. Highlights among the companies include: Algal Scientific Corporation, Ener-G-Rotors, and Energy Materials Corporation, which were the three "most promising companies" chosen by the extensive panel of investors, including David Wells from Kleiner Perkins, Alex Kinnier of Khosla Ventures, and Annachiara Danielli of Golden Seeds.

Other companies of interest included Paper Battery Company, InnoSepra, and three NYC ACRE tenants, Wind Products, Sollega, and Rentricity.

My three take-aways from the two-day conference:

1.) Time-of-use pricing is essential to make the Smart Grid work and to manage pricing and habits;
2.) Storage to balance the load and demand is essential -- and large increases in intermittent generation (from distributed sources and Battery Electric Vehicles) will increase this need; and
3.) Energy efficiency is still the low hanging fruit and has still not been picked.

The bottom line? While progress has been made towards the new energy future, we've still got a long way to go.

There was a healthy discussion about the role of Europe and India in the future of energy, but the elephant in the room was clearly China.

As Congressman Steve Israel put it in his keynote address, "China is our Sputnik. We need to see China's taking leadership of the clean energy arena as a wake-up call."

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Green Skeptic Friday LinkFest - 07/16/10

Here are some links to articles of interest to The Green Skeptic this week:

Nick Hodge Deconstructs the Smart Grid and some investment opportunities in Seeking Alpha: Smart Grid

Fred Wilson (despite being on vacation in Europe) wrote a compelling piece on the "seed fund phenomenon," which has implications for cleantech investing: AVC

One of my favorite San Diego companies, Envision Solar, announced it is teaming up with Pennsylvania-based battery storage company Axion on "solar tree" parking lots that track the sun from NYT Green.

GE announced its $200 million smart grid challenge and unveiled an electric vehicle charger: $GE

Shari Shapiro over at Green Building Law Blog offered her perspective on the Smart Metering controversy brewing in states around the US in "Smarting Over Smart Meters The Sequel--Maryland Rejects Smart Meters." And I added my two cents in "Smart Meters, Smart Grid and Dumb Folks."

New ARPA-E awards were announced for grid-scale storage, power electronics & building efficiency: ARPA-E

Smart grid networking startup Trilliant snags a massive $106M investment: Trilliant

And BP announced it is buying Verenium’s biofuels business for $98M, proving there is such thing as an exit in cleantech investing: Boston Business Journal

Probably the most thought-provoking piece I read this week was Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's take on "The Creativity Crisis" in Newsweek.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Smart Meters, Smart Grids and Dumb Folks

Image by S Migol via Flickr

My friend Shari Shapiro at Green Building Law blog makes some good points about the recent smart meter debate going on in California, Texas, Maryland, and now Fairfax, Virginia: 

Smarting Over Smart Meters The Sequel--Maryland Rejects Smart Meters

I agree with Shari that "smart metering is as close as you can get to free market allocation of electricity. When demand is high, prices increase, when demand is low, prices decrease."

And I don't buy the irrational fears about smart meters being "Big Environmental Brother" telling you what to do and taking information about your usage for nefarious purposes.

If folks are that concerned about privacy issues, they best get off the grid entirely, throw out their cable box, stay off the Internet, and cut up their credit cards. Oh, and while they're at it, better stop using that GPS-enabled mobile phone.

Smart metering, which is only a small piece of the overall smart grid puzzle, as Katie Fehrenbacher of Earth2Tech pointed out last week, allows for greater choice and control by consumers over their usage and relative costs of electricity.

Sure, utilities can "control" demand when they need to, but that will only enhance the reliability of electricity delivery, an increasingly important need as our lives, businesses, and economies become even more entwined with the grid.

And that grid is getting old and tired.

"Most of the electric utility infrastructure deployed in the industrialized world was built between 60 and 80 years ago," says Larry Fisher, research director of NextGen, a unit of ABI Research, which released a study on Smart Grid Applications last week.

"Much of this infrastructure is outdated," Fisher says, "and with the continuing increase in demand for power year after year, the grid cannot safely and reliably manage the loads of today and tomorrow without significant upgrades."

Further, the "cumulative global investment in smart grids, including smart meter implementations as well as upgrades to the transmission and distribution infrastructure, will approach $46 billion by 2015," according to the ABI report.

That sounds like an incredible free market opportunity to me. We are fools to ignore it or let the Chicken Littles kill it with their ungrounded fears.

Don't let the dumb folks take the smart out of your investing in the future.

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Of SmartGrids and HANs: The Future is Here @ GridWeek 2009

I dropped into the GridWeek conference today and found that the Smart Grid is alive and well and flush with dreams of stimulus money and full of players both big and small.

But as I toured the exhibit space in between press briefings, I couldn't help thinking that there are a heck of a lot of smart meters, Home Area Networks (HANs) and energy management web portals competing for the same, well, bandwidth.

A company I've been watching, Boulder-based Tendril was there showing off its TREE (Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem). TREE is an in-home wireless network that allows appliances and electrical outlets to talk instantly and directly to a home energy monitor or web portal. Through the web portal consumers can understand and manage their energy consumption in real-time and adjust usage according to their needs -- even remotely. (No more calling the neighbor to have them adjust the thermostat you accidentally left set too high or too low.)

And Redwood City's Silver Spring Networks was there, too, announcing this morning that they are acquiring Greenbox Technologies (the latest venture from the creators of Flash).

This is likely the first of many such mergers and acquisitions in this space -- both vertically integrated and otherwise -- as others are talking about various interoperability partnerships.

"Interoperability" is the buzzword at GridWeek 2009, along with cybersecurity. It will become an even more important concept once the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveals its plan for interoperability standards and protocols. NIST is responsible for developing what amounts to the next generation communications protocols and standards.

Interoperability, according to NIST, is "the ability of diverse systems and their components to work together" and "is vitally important to the performance of the Smart Grid at every level. It enables integration, effective cooperation, and two-way communication among the many interconnected elements of the electric power grid."

In other words, these standards will allow "smart" appliances and meters to inform consumers about their power consumption and its cost. Consumers will have much more control over their power consumption and energy bills.

Such standards will also allow utilities (and decentralized power generators) "mix and manage varying supplies of solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources and better respond to changing demand."

Department of Energy Secretary Chu announced his vision for the Smart Grid on Monday (here's a link to his presentation in PDF format).

As part of his presentation, the Secretary announced a $144 million jobs training program to support implementation of the Smart Grid and an additional $44.2 million in awards to State Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) to hire and retrain PUC staff as utilities ramp up Smart Grid activities.

Secretary Chu stopped short of announcing when the first round of DOE stimulus awards would be made in the Smart Grid space, and a spokesperson later asserted that the announcement would not be made until November.

But for today and the rest of this week, the future has arrived -- and it is connected, networked, and smart.

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So What's a Smart Grid Anyway? It's More Power to Ya.

Image by horizontal.integration via Flickr

What is a Smart Grid? Perhaps it is easier to start with what a Smart Grid is NOT.

A Smart Grid is not a bunch of one-way meters spinning around as you consume and a guy who drives around checking the meter periodically, sometimes correcting assumptions made by your electric company about your energy consumption and sometimes not.

A Smart Grid is not a grid that is subject to the whims of weather, mischievous squirrels, bird strikes or spikes in consumption by millions of users.

So, what is a Smart Grid, then?

The good folks at Inhabitat.com put it this way:

A smart grid delivers electricity using digital technology that tracks power consumption with smart meters, special electrical meters that instantly transmit energy usage information to utilities via wireless networks. Smart meters also let us track our own energy use hour-by-hour on the Internet and with third-party computer programs.

Basically, we're talking about real-time, two-way communication between you or your business and your utility provider. This helps manage usage and flow and consumption, can help predict spikes and shift sources rapidly in response to changing needs.

And if you have solar panels, wind turbines, plug-in hybrid vehicles or any other potential generating source, smart grid technology will help you feed that into the mix, so that you become a generator, not just a consumer.

Toronto Star energy writer Tyler Hamilton describes it this way:

The true vision of the smart grid is a self-healing, automated grid that can manage complex flows of electrons, from the hundreds — potentially thousands — of large and small sources of power to the millions of homes, businesses, industrial customers and, potentially, electric cars that require that energy.

Okay, so basically, a Smart Grid is like a brain for energy distribution. Nerve endings all over your body send information back to the brain telling the brain when you are too hot or too cold; that you need more energy in one part of the body or another (exercise and eating, for instance, have different requirements in different regions of the body); and helps you regulate your every action.

Many players are getting involved in the act, from the federal government, which recently allocated $3.3B to Smart Grid technology development, to start-ups and even large companies like IBM and Google.

Google's PowerMeter, which they describe as being in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to your home electricity consumption right on your iGoogle homepage.

Imagine being able to track and manage your own energy consumption so that you know when it will be least expensive to do your laundry or watch that episode of "Lost" that you Tivo'd. (Of course, that time is probably overnight when you are asleep, but nevertheless...)

Essentially a Smart Grid will put more power in the hands of consumers and make them partners with utilities rather than simply customers or rate payers. In the last analysis, a Smart Grid is just what it sounds like: smart.

Here are more resources on the concept of a Smart Grid:

Wired article from March 2009

Earth2Tech.com FAQ, which includes a list of companies working on various components for making the grid smarter.

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DOE Announces $3.3B in Grants for Smart-Grid Initiatives

"The Smart Grid is the iPod of the energy industry," Audrey Zibelman, CEO of Viridity Energy, said last week. Getting a sophisticated, two-way communication system that matches knowledge with efficiency, and maybe even gets better information into the hands of energy consumers is a critical step in ensuring we have reliable power to meet increasing demand.

Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting into the act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to be precise, as they announce plans to distribute more than $3.3 billion in so called smart-grid technology development grants and an additional $615 million for smart grid storage, monitoring and technology viability.

Read the Full Story: DOE & Smart Grid.

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Google and GE Entering Partnership on Smart Grid Technology

From New York Times: "Google and General Electric said Wednesday that they would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of 'smart grid' technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently.

"The companies said their goal is to make renewable energy more accessible and useful."

The importance of updating and shifting the transmission grid in the US can not be overstated. This would be a boon (not to mention a Boone) to making alternatives more feasible and the new green economy more possible.

Read the full story at: http://tinyurl.com/53rlk5

(Disclosure: The author holds small positions in both Google and GE. This information is not intended as investment advice or promotion.)