Thomas Friedman to speak at GridWeek... Clinton gets the Smart Grid… Trilliant obtains financing… Flashy energy dashboard … GE snaps up Smart Grid company… New BPL Global offering… Important standard for home area networks.
By Jesse Berst
Aug 26, 2008 - 2:24:35 PM

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Thomas Friedman to speak at GridWeek. Mr. Friedman, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning columnist will give the closing plenary speech on Thursday, September 25^th. Anto Budiardjo, President & CEO of Clasma Events Inc.,  GridWeek’s organizer confirmed this late addition.

   QuickTake: Mr. Friedman’s newest book Hot, Flat & Crowded will go on sale September 8, 2009. From his website – “Friedman proposes that an ambitious national strategy—which he calls "Geo-Greenism"—is not only what we need to save the planet from overheating; it is what we need to make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.”

   Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman

   GridWeek 2008 website

 

Clinton keynote favorable to Smart Grid. In the opening keynote for the National Clean Energy Summit, former President Bill Clinton revealed smart and surprisingly specific prescriptions for a transition to a green economy. High on the list: the need for grid modernization. Best of all, Clinton supports the mechanisms needed to finance that modernization, including taxpayer support and mandatory utility decoupling. Ironically, according to a story in Grist, the audience was disappointed with his practical, grownup specifics. They were hoping for the wishful thinking clichés typical from most politicians, which can usually be summarized as “Something must be done! And somebody must do it! And then somebody must pay for it! And they must do it somehow! And they must do it someday! Thank you very much!”

   QuickTake: I disagree with Bill Clinton on most topics, ranging from his personal ethics to his taste in interns. But at least he gets the Smart Grid. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he would have made a good First Lady after all.

   Grist article on Clinton’s keynote

 

Trilliant latest Smart Grid company to get big VC dollars. Following in the footsteps of GridPoint, BPL Global and Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant Incorporated has secured $40M in venture financing from MissionPoint Capital and zouk ventures. The Redwood, CA-based company is best known for its mesh networking communications infrastructure. Increasingly, however, it is emphasizing the solutions it can build on top of that infrastructure, including demand response and meter data management.

   QuickTake: With a team of veterans from related industries, Trilliant is one grid firm that sees where things are headed. All the more so since its new VC partners are amongst the brightest around. Expect it to joust with Gridpoint to become a de facto platform for managing the Smart Grid. That coveted position is still up for grabs since many of the logical platform providers – Areva, ABB, Siemens – don’t understand that the grid sector is now more like the PC market of the 80s or the Internet market of the 90s than the traditional utility sector of the 60s and 70s.

   Speaking of people that don’t get it, you might ask yourself this: If the Silicon Valley VCs are as smart as they think they are, why did they lose this opportunity in their own backyard to rival investors from Connecticut and London? I guess it’s easy to get distracted when you are busy shooting yourself in the foot with braindead biofuels deals.

   Trilliant press release

   MissionPoint Capital home page

   zouk ventures home page

 

“Flashy” energy dashboard from Silver Spring and Greenbox. Silver Spring Networks has teamed with Greenbox Technology to build an energy management dashboard for customers of Oklahoma Gas & Electric. Silver Spring provided the network infrastructure. Greenbox – founded by the man who created the Flash multimedia technology that is now ubiquitous on the Internet – provided the easy-to-use Web interface. The dashboard lets customers see when and where they are using energy with visualizations and email alerts. It lets utilities reduce demand (through efficiency) and shift peak loads through demand response.

   QuickTake: The grid space is seeing an influx of talent from the computing and Internet industries. Watching these aggressive, savvy startups take on the staid electric power industry is like watching the U.S.A. Dream Team play basketball against a squad from the local retirement community.

   Greenbox press release

   Silver Spring home page

 

General Electric snaps up Irish Smart Grid firm. General Electric appears to be firming up its product line to take a higher profile in the Smart Grid space. It has just acquired Kelman, Ltd. for an undisclosed sum, calling it “an excellent fit” with GE’s overall Smart Grid initiative. Although Kelman sells a variety of products, including traditional gear, it is notable for remote monitoring of transformers, along the lines of the equipment from BPL Global subsidiary Serveron (see story below).

   QuickTake: Eighteen months ago, SGN predicted the Smart Grid sector would see consolidation starting in the 2nd half of 2008. Although we doubt they did it just to make us look good, here is General Electric right on cue.

   businessGreen.com article and analysis

   Kelman home page

 

BPL Global adds to its Smart Grid portfolio with transformer monitoring. As the initials in its name attest, Pittsburgh-based BPL Global started out emphasizing broadband over powerline, aka BPL. Like rival Current Group, it discovered that BPL is problematic, and switched to emphasizing the things it can build on top of BPL (or on top of almost any communications network). In January, it acquired Portland-based Serveron, maker of innovative transformer monitoring products. BPL Global has now broadened its offerings with power transformer bushing monitoring, courtesy of Serveron technology.

   QuickTake: We’ve been saying for a while that distribution and substation automation would get hot in 2009. Advanced metering and demand response will continue to be important, but the long-term total solution for utilities will include distribution automation on the same platform. BPL Global gets it. Let’s see how quickly its competitors catch on.

   BPL Global press release

 

UtilityAMI group approves new home networking specifications. UtilityAMI is a task force for the development of open standards for advanced metering. Supported by the California Energy Commission and others, it builds high-level guidelines that can become the basis of open standards. The group has now approved specifications for home area networks (HANs). Those specifications help answer the question of how advanced meters should connect to the home networks of the future. If utilities and vendors can target an open standard, they don’t have to write their own interfaces for each different flavor of HAN, thereby lowering both the cost and the risk.

   QuickTake: At first glance, a technical standards announcement might not seem like big news. Until you realize that the electric power industry is transforming to open standards. For both utilities and vendors, it is crucial to monitor standards as they gel over the next 18 months and to get on board early. For an object lesson, look at the traction Silver Spring has gotten by virtue of its early support for Internet protocols.

   UtilityAMI home page

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