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Posts Tagged ‘Energy Use’

Will Apple become the next home energy management giant?

With the Smart Grid predicted to become a $200 billion industry over the next five years, it’s not surprising that many IT companies — Google, Microsoft, Intel and others — have reached for their own piece of the pie. But all of them are going to have to make room for a new giant: Apple. The iconic maker of the iPod, iPhone and now iSlate has just patented its own home power management panel.

As novel as this sounds, Apple isn’t introducing any brand new technology. Its home energy management dashboard will be based on HomePlug’s system. HomePlug makes panels that plug into basic wall sockets. In a matter of minutes, this devices connect with every outlet in the house via broadband internet. This type of technology is better known in Europe. But for now, Apple’s power management device is nothing more than a couple of patents — it’ll be a while yet before they’re turned into anything more.

The idea behind a possible device would be to connect a central interface to smart appliances around the home. Users will be able to view how much energy they are using in real time, as well as how much it is costing them. This could give them incentive to change their behavior to conserve both energy and money. Whether an Apple product would allow people to see this information via a special Apple device like a compact monitor, or your television screen or internet browser (like Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter) remains unknown.

It makes sense why Apple would choose to pursue home energy management. Of all the businesses related to the construction of a cleaner, more efficient electrical grid, home energy monitoring systems are the slickest and most consumer friendly of the bunch. Just look at AlertMe and its line of high-design devices for measuring energy use, or Control4 which makes a dashboard interface shockingly similar to that of the iPhone.

On one hand, this segment of the industry is prepped to become the first cleantech bubble (a la one of our 2010 predictions) — there are simply too many companies after the same brass ring. On the other hand, Apple has the manpower, design sense and brand recognition to become the dominant force in the space if it so chose. It’ll be exciting to see what the company comes up with.

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Smart grids drag utilities into the swamp of online privacy

The smart grid is rapidly becoming a reality in the US, as utilities have been installing networked monitoring and control equipment, both in their own facilities and in their customers’ homes. The pace of these installations should accelerate due to recent initiatives from the Department of Energy and the state of California; across the border, the Province of Ontario will see smart meters installed in every home by the end of next year. Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner has now worked with members of the Future of Privacy Forum to analyze the privacy implications of these initiatives. The resulting report indicates that there are a variety of potential privacy concerns, some of which are best addressed before the deployments begin in earnest.

Nearly half of the report simply reviews what the smart grid entails, specifically from the consumer perspective. In general terms, a smart meter, combined with smart appliances and other hardware, will allow consumers to obtain fine-grained information about their energy use patterns, and exercise a greater degree of control over them. As the report notes, this can have a wide variety of positive consequences, from more efficient use of energy resources to lowered electric bills. So the general message is that concerns about privacy shouldn’t derail plans to deploy smart grids.

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Google Makes World Bank Data More Discoverable: Takes a Swipe at Wolfram Alpha

Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like “children per woman in brazil” or “internet users in the united states.” To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank’s public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the news about Wolfram Alpha’s integration with Microsoft’s Bing.

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Google vs. Wolfram

Earlier this year, Google also added data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division to its search results page. The queries that Google showcases in today’s blog post (gdp of a country, internet users in the US or energy use in Iceland) are exactly the kind of queries where Wolfram Alpha excels. Currently, Bing doesn’t display this kind of data from Wolfram Alpha and just focuses on math and nutrition, but a deeper integration between the two is just a matter of time.

Wolfram Alpha uses curated data sets – just like the World Bank or Census Bureau data – to compute its results. Google’s current use of this data is less ambitious. Google wants to make public data more accessible – Wolfram Alpha wants to be a ‘computational knowledge engine’ that can manipulate these data sets.

Google Wants Your Public Data

One interesting aspect of today’s blog post is that Google points out that there are “still many other data sets and sources out there, and we’re excited about the possibilities for the future.” Google also asks data publishers who are interested in making their data discoverable in Google to contact the company.

In the current implementation, Google can display results for the following types of questions:

CO2 emissions per capita,Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP,Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Discuss

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AlertMe teams with Google, British Gas to give consumers more control over energy use

AlertMe is the newest energy monitoring device maker to partner with Google PowerMeter, giving homeowners more information and control over how much electricity they are using, and how much they pay for it. By providing hardware that plugs into your home’s traditional electric meter and your broadband connection, British-based AlertMe now makes power consumption data available on your internet browser via the Google PowerMeter interface — if you happen to live in the United Kingdom.

The partnership between the two companies is launching first in Britain, where average consumers can buy AlertMe’s hardware and use it to track their electricity starting today. They don’t need to inform their utility, or do anything more than plug the devices — called the Meter Reader and Hub — into their corresponding sockets. Together, this equipment (see image above) costs about $113 (£69) upfront and $4.90 (£2.99) a month for online access; or a lump payment of $162.14 (£99) for the hardware and 12 months of online service.

“The equipment pays for itself in about a year,” says AlertMe CEO Pilgrim Beart, referring to the average energy savings that buyers usually see after installing the system. “Most people don’t think of this kind of purchase in terms of returns on investment, but it’s a short enough time frame that it makes sense.” (Beart will be speaking at VentureBeat’s upcoming GreenBeat conference focused on the Smart Grid on Nov. 18-19)

This is the second deal that Google has struck with a Smart Grid device company allowing it to activate PowerMeter in homes that are not equipped with smart meters — the first, announced earlier this month, was with Energy Inc., maker of The Energy Detective (TED 5000) home energy monitoring device.

In order to work in most areas, PowerMeter depends on smart meters that wirelessly beam energy consumption data to utilities and their customers. That is why Google has partnered with nine utility companies in the U.S. and Europe. But now, with the TED 5000 and AlertMe system in its arsenal, it doesn’t have to wait for smart meters to be installed to serve data to its users.

AlertMe’s online service gives its customers access to their power consumption data from any computer or device with an internet connection, including smartphones, via the personalized iGoogle portal (see image below). (Before now, AlertMe delivered data through its own web-based dashboard). In addition to toggling online options, the device maker’s customers can also build out their AlertMe home systems with SmartPlugs that take energy readings from and allow remote control over certain appliances, like thermostats.

British Gas has signed up to be the major retail channel for AlertMe’s devices. As the utility in the U.K., the company will market it to its customers as another way for them to conserve while saving money on their electrical bills. AlertMe’s Beart says the deal is a win-win for his company and the utility, with the former getting the name-brand stamp of approval from British Gas, and the latter adding to its portfolio of consumer services, the source of nearly 50 percent of its revenue.

“In a competitive utility market like Britain’s, AlertMe can differentiate one from another,” Beart said. “It’s an attractive offering encouraging people to move to a utility, or stay with a utility.”

Notably, this is the second Smart Grid news involving British Gas in as many days. Earlier today, news broke that the utility inked a deal with Trilliant to deploy its UnitySuite software, ensuring that its smart electric and gas meters can communicate seamlessly with its backend systems, home energy displays and smart appliances. While the AlertMe deal with British Gas is unrelated to this development, the two stories together indicate a shift in the utility’s business operations toward a cleaner, more efficient grid.

Smart Grid development in the U.K., where the electric grid is even more fragile and antiquated than it is in the U.S., has been slow going. But now, with its big-name utility brand on board, making significant deals with Smart Grid companies, it may be able to turn the situation around faster than anticipated.

Beart hinted that AlertMe’s partnership with Google will probably hop the Atlantic sometime in the near future, but he couldn’t be more specific, saying only, “You’ll see plenty of action from AlertMe in the U.S. next year.”

AlertMe, based in Cambridge, England, raised its first round of venture funding in June of this year, amounting to $13 million from Good Energies, Index Ventures and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

And here’s a quick visual overview of the AlertMe hardware:

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Get your discounted early-bird tickets before Oct. 31 at GreenBeat2009.com.

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US consumers could save a France’s worth of greenhouse gases

ALT TITLES: Behavioral changes can drive huge reductions in CO₂
Cheap, available tech can drop US CO₂ emissions

For the most part, efforts to improve the energy efficience (and thus the environmental impact) of the US economy have focused on big, transformative technologies, such as renewable power and a smarter grid. But direct energy use by domestic households, either for housing or personal transport, accounts for nearly 40 percent of the US total, which makes it a larger contributor to global CO₂ emissions than any nation other than China. A new study suggests that with modest behavioral changes and consumer adoption of simple and cheap technology, the US could reduce its emissions by an amount equivalent to the entire output of France.

The paper, which will appear sometime later this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, focuses on what it calls “behavioral approaches” to controlling energy use. Some of these, like car pooling, don’t necessarily involve any form of technology. Others, like energy-efficient hot water heaters, do involve a degree of technology, but the tech is well understood, inexpensive, and already widely available—so it’s “behavioral” in the sense that we actually have to convince more people to use it.

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Nerve cells have an energy efficiency an engineer would love

At first glance, nerve cells would appear to be energy hogs. The brain accounts for only about two percent of a human’s body mass, but burns through 20 percent of its energy budget. But transmitting signals by nerves is a multistep process, and it hasn’t been clear which step burns through the most energy. This isn’t a purely academic question: entire fields of study use PET scans and functional MRI imaging to track areas of the brain that are using energy, under the assumption that these are the most active. Now, researchers have followed the progress of impulses down a nerve fiber, and determined that the process is remarkably efficient, using only about 30 percent more than the idealized lower limit of energy use.

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More utilities look to the DOE for smart grid financing

Both Connecticut’s United Illuminating and Illinois’ Commonwealth Edison have filed applications to receive stimulus funds from the U.S. Department of Energy to accelerate their smart grid plans. Applying for $37.5 million and $175 million, respectively, the utility companies are hoping to match funds they have already raised for project-based development.

United Illuminating, based in New Haven, Conn., says it would use the money to install communication infrastructure to more easily monitor and manage its electrical grid across the network. The project, which will require installing new equipment in residential and commercial areas, as well as at substations and power plants, is slated to cost $75 million total and take a little less than three years to complete. From the description, its likely that advanced smart meters will be a main component of the shift, allowing energy consumers to view relevant data that could encourage conservation. United Illuminating says the new technology will also allow it to view almost immediately when and why outages take place, saving it maintenance costs and improving service.

Commonwealth Edison, which covers northern Illinois and serves 70 percent of the state’s population, says it would use the matching funds to roll out 141,000 new smart meters in Chicago and 11 suburban areas surrounding the city, according to VentureWire. The utility says that this project would generate 3,800 new jobs in the local area, and cut down the number of grid outages and distruptions a year by up to 400,000. As part of the smart meter deployment, the utility would also install monitors in people’s homes that would communicate energy use and costs, and even allow them to control their consumption from remote locations. This is a pretty advanced strategy for a utility, most of which are focused primarily on nailing down smart meters, not the end-user interface. It is partnering with General Electric and Silver Spring Networks in this effort.

This is the second application ComEd has recently filed with the DOE. It is also asking for funds for research on the integration of solar power with storage systems and smart meter networks.

Also in the flock of utilities tapping the DOE for support is Consolidated Edison, located in New York. The utility did not say how much it is seeking — only that it will go toward a $375 million series of smart grid projects, including the roll out of 40,000 smart meters. It says $6 million will be funneled into a 300-customer test program for in-home energy displays and web portals based in Queens, N.Y., as well as integration between New York City’s grid and the 100-kilowatt solar system on the roof of LaGuardia Community College.

The Department of Energy has $3.9 billion set aside to match funds for smart grid initiatives nationwide. About $3.3 billion will go toward commercial-scale projects with the remaining $615 million earmarked for the development and demonstration of new technologies in the area. The DOE says it will start distributing grants in October at the absolute earliest (not counting a few pilot projects that have already benefited).

United Illuminating, ComEd and ConEd join several other major utilities already waiting around the trough, including Texas-based Oncor (looking for $317 million), Baltimore Gas & Electric (looking for $200 million), Maryland-based Pepco Holdings (looking for $254 million), Washington-based Avista (seeking $20 million) and Arizona-based Salt River Project (seeking an undisclosed amount).

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