09 Feb 2012
DistribuTECH – home of the energy press release … and time to probe energy trends for the year ahead … a great show makes for excellent media …
Smart Grid News: DistribuTECH Buzz
The Smart Grid News Team wrote a comprehensive, three-part article highlighting the major announcements made at the DistribuTECH conference. This series proved to be a very valuable index of the big news that came out of the event.
Part one covered the following press releases:
Itron apps help utilities maximize value of smart grid data
Glen Canyon wins 1.5 million virtual AMI deployment in China
New Opower Marketplace...
23 Nov 2011
The UK is significantly renovating its electric infrastructure (Smart Grid.) The renovation will manage intermittent, renewable energy generation and the future deployment of electric vehicles.
Along with renewables, the UK is envisioning a bigger role for electric transport. To support these technologies, the country needs to upgrade its infrastructure and energy sector. The government budgets £200bn (US$312.8bn) to rebuild the country’s electricity infrastructure, according to the Energy Minister, Charles Hendry.
There are 6 major gas and electricity suppliers, providing 95% of the power for commercial customers. There are other independent operators, but the...
15 May 2012
Aussie’s NSW biodiesel plant gets go ahead … while Kiwis prepare for GreenWave’s easy-to-use HEMs … Origin Energy enter recording breaking deal … and NZ smart homes project gets top tech platform!
EnergyBusinessNews.com: New South Wales biodiesel plant a go
Lachlan Colquhoun announced that NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, gave the green light to a US$273m soybean processing and biodiesel production facility. The Port Kembla, south-Sydney factory will produce soybean meal, used in stock feed, and also soy biodiesel, to be used as fuel.
The plant will produce 288 million liters of biodiesel annually to supply to major companies like Caltex, Xstrata and BHP. The company in...
15 May 2012
Japan sounds alarm bells at electricity shortages… Smarter innovations stand to overshadow AMI … South Korean lawmakers unite for carbon trading vote … China courts EU green energy leaders
Prensa Latina: Japan admits to seriousness of energy crisis
Prensa Latina reports that Japan’s Minister of Industry, Yukio Edano, acknowledged his country may face an unprecedented energy crisis. The minister’s admission comes after Japan retired the last of its 54 nuclear plants on May 5, 2012, thereby losing about 30% of its electricity generation.
Edano said there...
08 May 2012
US smart meter installations set to plummet until 2014 … but smart grid opportunities are more than a sum of the meters … and FPL communicate smart grid
GigaOm: Smart meter installations to decline in the US over next 2 years
Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm writes that although smart meters will eventually be standard issue in the US, smart meter installations will drastically decrease in the next two years, before they pick up again. According to Pike Research, smart meter shipments will drop by an astonishing 42% between 2011 and 2013, but this trend will slowly reverse by 2014.
The reasons behind this drop:
California is a...
25 Jan 2012
A first-ever ‘Smart Grid Demand Response Project’ launched in China, with Honeywell International as contractor.
What happened
PRNewsWire.com released Honeywell International’s press announcement on the company’s agreement with the Tianjin Economic Development Area (TEDA) to build China’s first smart grid demand response (DR) project.
The announcement represented the launch of the demand response pilot system sponsored by the US-China Economic Cooperation Program (ECP), which aims to establish smart grid industry standards and regulations across all of China.
Background ...
29 Nov 2011
A continuing black-eye for how US utilities handle Smart Grid conversions. The City of Boulder in Colorado, US has voted to convert its electric infrastructure from private to public ownership. The private utility, Xcel Energy had spent a lot of money attempting to make Boulder the world’s first Smart Grid City. It seems Xcel should have spent...
What Happened
One of the world’s first smart grid cities, designed to prove that smart grid technologies could deliver value to customers, has created a political, and eventually economic, dispute between one of the bigger publically-owned utilities in the US, Xcel Energy, and one of the most progressive, technology-friendly communities in the US, Boulder, Colorado, resulting in bad news for all concerned.
Background
Xcel Energy, an electric utility serving eight Southwest and...
08 May 2012
The Japanese Smart Homes Standardization Group chose the widely acclaimed G3-PLC protocol, as one of the communications platforms for Japan’s smart meter projects for home area networks.
What happened
Rajani Baburajan at TMCNet.com reported that Maxim Integrated announced its G3-PLC protocol has been recommended as one of the communications platforms for Japan’s smart meter projects for home area networks (HANs).
Following the submission by the Smart Home Standardization Study Group, Japanese electrical utilities will use the G3-PLC protocol to establish communication between a smart meter and a home energy management system (HEMS) in HANs.
In an announcement to Utility...
28 Feb 2012
As Vermont races to build the first statewide smart grid infrastructure, in time to keep its stimulus funding, IBM and Velco have joined forces to build an intelligent communications and control network across the state.
What happened
IBM and Velco (Vermont Electric Power Company,) in a press statement announced they would team up to build the first statewide smart grid in the US. The statement described it as “an intelligent fiber optic and carrier ethernet communications and control network across the State of Vermont.”
Janette Bombardier (director, IBM Vermont site operations and senior location executive,) states, “the state is embarking on a revolutionary plan to build the...
08 May 2012
Smart meter deployment is charging ahead in the US, focusing on customer behaviors and demand reduction, but is it time to step back, take a breath and look to other smart technologies to ensure the success of the smart grid?
What happened
Ron Chebra, vice president, Management & Operations Consulting, DNV KEMA Energy & Sustainability wrote an article “Should advanced metering infrastructure take a back seat to distribution automation?” for Smart Grid Sherpa. In this article, Chebra points to the huge amounts of money invested in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in North America that has been economically justified by the promise of demand reduction and customer behavior change. He then...
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