SMART GRID ROUNDUP: Grants for National Smart Grid Announced, Hacking the Smart Grid; Wind and Solar Power Drives Need For Smart Grid

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 US Needs a Green Energy Marshall Plan Now!

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.

2009 Will be a Year of Consolidation in Solar

After a run of some years of heady double digit growth the Solar PV sector in the US has hit a period of slower growth in which some of the weaker players are being shaken out of the market. This year will be characterized by consolidation as more successful firms and better capitalized firms build their market share and absorb weaker players. This shakeout was inevitable and is natural, but it was undoubtedly triggered by the financial crash of late 2008 coupled with the bursting of the oil futures speculative bubble and the temporary collapse in prices on the oil spot markets.

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