Distributed energy systems can range from the micro sized do it yourself systems being installed on rooftops and on hilltops to small scale systems ranging up to around 20MW (megawatts) of capacity, although it must be understood that this is a pretty fuzzy boundary. The defining characteristic of distributed energy systems is that they generate energy close to the point of use where that energy will be consumed; hence the admittedly fuzzy 20MW upper boundary for their size.
This is another installment of my weekly series of interviews I have conducted with people who have made a career transition to the clean/green sector. Last week focused on my interview with Laks Sampath, a Principal with ElliptlQ Energy Partners, who made a transition from Software to Solar. This week we are presenting my interview with Nicholas Mack, General Counsel, for Mainstream Energy Corporation, REC Solar, Inc., AEE Solar, Inc.
Energy solutions that are described as “smart”, from smart buildings to smart appliances to the Smart Grid and semiconductors are projected to make a huge impact on the United States’ ability to significantly reduce our spending and use of energy. Between now and 2030, electricity bills could be reduced by $1.3 trillion assuming that the right investments and policies are in place, eliminating the need by the end of the period for 296 power plants with the use of the semiconductors used to improve the software capabilities of the technologies we use on a daily basis, says a report released recently by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).
Last week, at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, Energy Secretary Chu called for a revolution, “a second industrial revolution.” The first industrial revolution came with a “carbon dioxide cost” but “in the next industrial revolution, we must develop technologies that will enable us to get the energy the world needs to grow and prosper but “essentially reducing and eliminating the carbon dioxide,” he said. Chu said the United States has the greatest research and development centers in the world in universities, national labs and the private sector. “Once we get this great invention machine geared and going we’d be invincible. But the only trouble is, let’s get it going.”
SustainableBusiness.com recently announced its 2009 Sustainable Business 20 (SB20) List: The World’s Top Sustainable Stocks. The 8th Annual SB20 List consists of 20 public companies that are leading the way to a sustainable economy. The list is presented in the Progressive Investor newsletter, published by SustainableBusiness.com, which tracks and analyzes green stocks. To choose the 20 companies, SustainableBusiness.com works with a group of judges, who are among the most respected green stock analysts in the world. Judges select companies across the range of green business sectors – solar, wind, geothermal, smart grid, water, food, agriculture, green building and transport. In addition, over a third of the companies populating this year’s SB20 List are “Corporate Pioneers” – companies with conventional products and services that are greening their product lines.
This is an article devoted to the idea that a revolution in software design is needed in order to produce software –or as insiders often refer to it: the code – that is both greener itself and that is designed to help other systems and products become greener… i.e. more energy and resource efficient, less wasteful, more adaptive to current conditions.
There are two often intertwined paths to follow, both of which are important for this discussion. Code itself needs to become greener; using virtual resources more efficiently and thus using fewer hardware resources and less power to accomplish the same computing tasks. Code should also be designed with a feature set that enables other products, running the code, to use less energy and to be able to time shift their energy requirements to off peak periods.
Jackson Associates recently announced results from the first utility-detailed nationwide study of smart grid savings. It is the first study is to apply individual utility customer end-use hourly electric loads to evaluate smart grid costs and benefits. Data for more than 800,000 residential and commercial utility customers in the 200 largest US utilities were applied in the study.
Partly in response to the Department of Energy having placed interoperability high on its criteria for evaluating projects applying for some of the $3.9 billion in federal stimulus grants and also because the large utility and integrated energy companies prefer to work with fewer partners, there has been a fair bit of movement towards forming partnerships amongst some of the players in the Smart Grid space. Companies that have strengths in certain key sectors of the Smart Grid arena are linking up with players who are strong in different segments in order to be able to promote and market broader integrated solutions.
Marie Hattar, vice president of marketing in Cisco’s Network Systems Solutions group in an interview with LaMonica of CNet stated “Our expectation is that this network will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet. If you think about it, some homes have Internet access, but some don’t. Everyone has electricity access–all of those homes could potentially be connected.”
This is quite a large helping of hyperbole, possibly the product of an unguarded moment of enthusiasm, but it makes a good headline. Kidding aside the Smart Grid is going to be big business for technology companies. In the same interview Hattar said that Cisco believes that just the communications portion of the Smart Grid represents a $100 billion opportunity — “$20 billion a year over the next five years.”
