Smart Grid

Talking about a green revolution as a competition between China and the U.S. is like putting two teams on the same field that play different games. Yet, this has been the popular spin on news that China’s spending on smart grid technology will exceed that of the U.S. by $200 million. It has also been the spin on high-speed rail and the so-called "clean tech arms race."

But had this really ought to be understood as a competition? And is a fair comparison being made? The answer, according to some China experts, is no.

If you think IT and sustainability are two totally different worlds, think again.

Most of what is referred to as “smart” these days — smart transportation, the smart grid and smart cities, for example — is made intelligent by processors, sensors and analytical software, and of course the servers that make it all possible. So it’s not surprising to see tech giants like IBM wanting to create a smarter planet, Cisco wanting to craft smart tech solutions for utilities and companies, and plenty of other, smaller companies wanting a piece of the action.

But while the money and hoopla surrounding all things smart can cloud the issue a bit, the point is that infrastructure in this country is sorely in need of an overhaul. In its Smarter Cities Virtual Leader Forum today, IBM recapped what it’s doing to make education, transportation, government, energy and healthcare smarter. It sees cities as systems of systems.

Circular 698 caused a momentary pause throughout the business anglo-sino-blogosphere late last year.

China passed a retroactive look-through provision that effectively changed the rules for foreign investment structures in China. The Circular in and of itself is relatively innocuous. It highlights an oft misunderstood Chinese business sensitivity in China’s central economic planning: China for Chinese business only.

As China carries forward its strategy to adapt to and mitigate climate change, foreign owned clean technology businesses need to be aware of China’s position.

Although generally left out of stimulus funding, the less glamorous side of cleantech — manufacturing — got its day in the spotlight when the Obama administration announced $2.3 billion in tax credits last week for 183 manufacturing projects in 43 states.

The credits will help offset about 30 percent of costs for the projects, which should help speed things along for multiple U.S. cleantech sectors.

However, a breakdown of the credits highlights another gap in support. While renewable energy-related projects grabbed over half the credits — two of the three companies receiving more than $100 million in credits each are solar companies — only nine purely smart grid projects will be receiving credits, together totaling about $35 million.

Despite the fact that smart grid seemed to have been the cleantech press darling of the year, the companies producing smart grid-related products have not necessarily seen the influx of money analysts kept predicting.

Talk of the smartening up various things — the electrical grid, buildings, transportation and water systems — often wanders quickly into abstract ideas of a super-wired Jetsons-style future.

But at its core, the idea of making the various systems cities rely on smarter is not actually all that new or futuristic. Companies have been using software and sensors to manage their major assets for years, and now cities are getting in on it.

“Typically, the systems in place in cities are siloed solutions — you’ve got the police department, the transit authority, the parks and rec department and so on — so information is not easily shared,” Bill Sawyer, IBM's vice president of Maximo Operations, told SolveClimate.

“By putting in one system on one platform, they can eliminate a lot of inefficiencies.

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Some day, all our homes and office buildings will turn off the lights when we’re not around, make sure the coffee pot’s off, adjust our thermostats for maximum comfort and energy savings, and generally be the responsible energy users we have failed to be. It's the promise of the smart grid.

In order to do that, we’re going to need a whole lot of wireless sensors that talk to wireless transmitters and switches — and all those gadgets will need energy, too.

That's where ultra-low-power devices and energy harvesting come in.

Energy harvesting technology allows for the design of items such as sensors, transmitters and switches with extremely low power requirements. They need so little power, in fact, that they can simply “harvest” what they need from sources such as sunlight, the glow from a light bulb or vibrational energy from electrical cords.

As the buzz around smart grid technology and the market for home and building automation systems has heated up, so too has the world of energy harvesting, and along with it, a fight over technology rights.

When Cisco announced four months ago that it was getting into smart grid, it was more of a “we’re here, we’re Cisco, get used to it,” sort of announcement.

This morning, the company shared the nuts and bolts of its smart-grid offering, and its progress thus far, including a comprehensive security strategy and partnerships with everyone from ZigBee to General Electric.

There are two important bits of information couched in the company’s announcement of its many partners (all of which will be part of something Cisco is calling its SmartGrid Ecosystem):

First, it shows that Cisco will be able to provide comprehensive end-to-end smart grid solutions.

Second, it shows that IP is officially the communication standard for the smart grid. Even ZigBee, which had initially resisted the move to IP, is now a partner with Cisco.

The communications giant’s Ecosystem reads like a who’s who of smart grid:

A first ever-analysis of the budding shift to smart electric grids by America's utilities suggests that a system revolution is finally getting under way – particularly in California and Texas.

Three of the nation's top five utilities for smart grid growth are located in California, while the other two come from Texas, propelling these state forward as centers of grid innovation. So reveals the inaugural UtiliQ ranking of the nation's 25 most "intelligent" utilities by IDC Energy Insights and Intelligent Utility magazine.

"The California and Texas utilities are at the top of the list primarily because those states have either mandated or incented their utilities to make investments in renewable energy, smart metering and energy efficiency," Rick Nicholson, vice president of IDC Energy Insights, told SolveClimate.

San Diego-based Fortune 500 Sempra Energy finished first.

Because today's energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies lack connective infrastructure, they provide only first steps toward climate change mitigation.

Quantitatively they only make dents. This applies to building efficiency methods, such as improved lighting and insulation, and transportation efficiency methods such as higher fuel economy standards. The same for onshore wind and concentrated solar thermal, the first (after hydro) competitively-priced renewable technologies. In almost all cases, they lack integration with long distance or even local distribution systems to reach their markets.

These limitations are the main reasons a “smart” electrical grid, empowered by $4.5 billion in federal stimulus funds, is starting to graduate from R&D into products and services.

It's not an easy transition, though, as it surfaces large technology challenges as well as the positions of competing business sectors, technologies, and interests, and the less Machiavellian problems of industries that are working together for the first time. Splashing around now in one pool are the electrical utility, energy feedstock, information technology, building design and management, transportation, and electrical devices and appliances sectors.

With so much taxpayer money involved, President Obama's energy team is mandating up-front standards to ensure that what is built by these disparate forces works and is efficient.

The initial results illustrate the technology and business challenges, but also, a culture of innovation and the experience in business and industrial reinventions of the IT sector.

A battle is brewing in Congress over a climate and energy issue that is pitting the U.S. Senate and states west of the Mississippi against the U.S. House and states east of the mighty river.

It's a fight over expansion of the electric grid – the building of a new "transmission superhighway" – with boosters claiming you can't have a clean energy future without it, and more cautious skeptics saying it could be a huge waste of money that would hurt both the economy and the climate.

A scene from this unfolding political drama was performed before Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts last week, who held a hearing on the future of the grid in his House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment and set the stage with his opening comments.

The landmark climate bill he has co-sponsored with Rep. Henry Waxman of California calls for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to report back to Congress within three years with recommendations for grid development. Markey said:

Some believe we should go further, by substantially expanding federal authority to plan and site new transmission lines. That includes overriding state decisions to reject proposed lines and using federal eminent domain authority if necessary. I think we need to look closely and skeptically whether such a step is warranted at this juncture.

Markey urged caution (see complete statement, attached below) as did many others who testified, including Christopher Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council:

"Current and proposed transmission policies may produce a transmission grid that is over-built, overly complex and subject to reliability problems, and encourages increased reliance on fossil-fuel generation rather than distributed renewable generation, energy efficiency, conservation, and load management."

Nevertheless, action on federal transmission policy is picking up steam, with various proposals under consideration in both the House and the Senate, driven more by politics than policy wisdom.