Quite a bit is happening in the smart grid sector. In this post I quickly look at the breaking announcement by Vice President Joe Biden of more than $3.3 billion in stimulus funding for grants to drive the rollout of a nationwide electrical smart grid.
I continue to follow the hacking of the grid story and try to give some various perspectives on this issue and what is being done about it.
Finally I post on how the growing adoption of renewable energy like solar and wind will require the grid to evolve into a much smarter, robust system and to incorporate systems for storing transient excess energy.
The Report can be purchased as part of a subscription to Progressive Investor or separately for $89. Progressive Investor is a monthly newsletter that guides investors and analysts toward green investments. Published by SustainableBusiness.com, it covers all green business sectors, including renewable energy, green building and healthy lifestyle. You can read an excerpt of the Report on SustainableBusiness.com. It is an in-depth interview with Patrick McVeigh, president of Reynders, McVeigh Capital Management, a green/social portfolio management firm. Progressive Investor talked with him about his impression of market conditions, the impact of the stimulus plan on cleantech, and how they are managing porfolios under these circumstances. You can also read the sample article, The Green Investment Landscape.
The Smart Grid promises to make our energy (and also water and sewage systems) more efficient, robust and responsive by building a paired parallel information and control network onto the existing distribution networks. However hooking up the grid’s multitude of component units to a network also opens up the potential for the grid to be hacked — in much the same way anything that is exposed to the internet can be hacked.
The Cleantech Group™, founders of the clean technology investment category and providers of global market research and other services for the clean technology ecosystem, recently announced that it is making its 2008 Annual Review & 4Q08 Investment Monitor available for free download to celebrate Earth Day 2009. For one week only, this report will be available to non-members to dramatically illustrate how technology is being used to save our planet and its natural resources.
The following green career strategies and perspectives that I found around the web. The topics include: How to write a green resume; targeting your green job search; green career transition tips for the less experienced; who will be needed in the first wave of green jobs; 101 best Twitter feeds for job hunters; and why Van Jones took a job in the Obama Administration.
The Smart Grid will require substantial information processing, storage and data mining resources. An entire new software sector is rising to meet the challenges and fill the many new needs opened up by its arrival. Spending on the smart grid is estimated to be $165 billion over the next 20 years (Source: EPRI) and a good portion of this will be on software and data services. Here is a list of seven of the up and coming software companies that are actively offering software for the Smart Grid, for Smart Meters, for Power Analytics, for systems focused on improving the energy efficiency of the grid, and for energy management systems for homes and businesses tied to Smart Grid networks and designed to operate with it.
The clean tech green energy sector is hurting badly – along with the rest of our economy. A lot of promising new firms are on life support finding it very difficult to raise desperately needed venture capital. We need to be laying the foundations for future growth now and there is no time to waste, I would argue that this is a paramount issue of national security, that it is not just about jobs or being “green”, but that it is an urgently vital necessity for our country’s future security. This is not an optional choice; it is not a luxury, a nice to have kind of thing; this is the very life blood of our country, of our industrial society. An industrial society needs energy and lots of it. America needs to urgently begin a national crash program of investing in domestically controlled renewable energy supplies, such as wind and solar right now while we still have a little breathing room to begin laying the foundations for a new American energy economy. It is a matter of national security.
Smart meters, which are meters that are hooked up to a network so that they can deliver information about current usage in a timely manner, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Smart meters will enable real time energy decisions in response to current conditions. They form a critical cornerstone of the smart grid; in fact in many ways they are the “smart” in the smart grid. This opens up a whole slew of new opportunities for smart software developers and smart entrepreneurs [no pun intended] to build the software applications and services to support and to add value to these new smart networked grids. What kinds of software opportunities exist in this newly opening sector?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has introduced legislation to support president Obama’s vision of a green grid. The Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act will promote investments in transmission to facilitate access to renewable power, and also establish a streamlined planning and siting process for transmission lines. This legislation will make it easier for renewable energy suppliers to deliver clean energy from the often remote areas where it is harnessed to major population centers across the country.
