TreeHugger has a post on a new combination concentrating solar PV and concentrating solar thermal power device built by IBM - IBM solar collector magnifies sun by 2,000x (without cooking itself), costs 3x less than similar systems.

Cleverly combining solar PV with solar thermal to reach 80% conversion efficiency

Concentrating the sun's ray onto solar photovoltaic (PV) modules requires walking the fine line between optimizing power output and not literally melting your very expensive super-high-efficiency solar cells. A team led by IBM Research seems to have found a way to push back the line. They have created a High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system that is capable of concentrating the power of 2,000 suns onto hundreds of triple junction photovoltaic chips measuring a single square centimeter each (they even claim to be able to keep temperatures safe up to 5,000x). The trick is that each solar PV cell is cooled using technology developed for supercomputers; microchannels inspired by blood vessels but only a few tens of micrometers in width pipe liquid coolant in and extract heat "10 times more effective than with passive air cooling."

The beauty is that this heat is not just thrown away. This system gets useful work out of it. So while the PV modules are 30%+ efficient at converting the sun's light into electricity, another 50% of the sun's energy is captured as heat and can then be used to do things like thermal water desalination and adsorption cooling. This means that the system is capable of converting around 80% of the collected solar energy into useable energy (though the electricity is of course more useful than the thermal energy).

Australian IT News has a look at a smart grid project within AusGrid, increasing the level of data available about the distribution network - Ausgrid zeroes in on network faults.

Energy utility AusGrid has deployed monitoring devices in 2300 street-level cabinets in an ongoing effort to gain a more granular visibility of its electricity distribution network.

The utility had previously announced it would roll out the PowerSense devices in 12,000 of its 30,000 street-level power distribution boxes, coupled with a back-end data analysis system supplied by IBM.

The IBM system was funded as part of the Federal Government’s $100 million ‘Smart Grids, Smart Cities’ program, in which Ausgrid - formerly EnergyAustralia - has been trialling smart grid hardware, meters and applications at select areas in Sydney, the Hunter Valley region and Newcastle.

Ausgrid managing director George Maltabarow told iTnews that the newly deployed sensors would measure voltage and current between Ausgrid’s high voltage (11,000V) major zone substations and its street-level distribution units, where the current is converted into the 240V current used in households.

He said the sensors indicated whether there was any service interruptions on that street and what loads the equipment were carrying.

“The system has already proved itself in emergency situations,” he said. “We have already had major failures and used the system to prioritise and optimise where in the network we put generators in to provide supply.”

Diagnostic data was transmitted over a 3G network to larger substations, and then to the utility's central IT systems for monitoring and analysis over a fibre network.

Maltabarow said Ausgrid’s SCADA system had previously only provided visibility into the high voltage segment of the network. “Without this technology, we don’t know what’s going on in the [lower-voltage] distribution network,” he said.

The project was designed to deliver second-by-second analysis of faults in the utility’s electricity grid, with the same level of information previously only available to the company on an annual basis. ...

Once AusGrid has better data on its distribution network, the power utility will use a custom 4G network using a mixture of WiMAX and LTE technologies over spectrum leased from vividwireless to connect street-level distribution units to smart meters installed in residential premises.

The meters would optimise transmission and address service outages right down to the level of the individual customer. It would also allow customers to monitor their own energy usage at a house level and with individual devices, allowing room for potential customer rebates to incentivise energy consumption.

Maltabarow said AusGrid has identified 144 sites for antennae builds for a 4G network to complement these meters, 60 of which are already under construction.

The SMH has an article on a smartphone app that could help motorists reduce the amount of fuel wasted in traffic jams - IBM smartphone app predicts traffic jams.

IBM is testing smartphone software designed to predict traffic jams and warn motorists before they even take to the roads.

IBM said that its employees in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas of Northern California have been testing technology that "will ultimately help drivers around the world" avoid fouled traffic.

Those involved in the pilot project agree to have location-sensing capabilities in their smartphones automatically track where they drive and when, according to IBM Smarter Traveler program manager John Day.

The information is fed through the internet to computers that identify patterns such as commutes to and from work.

Meanwhile, data collected from roadway censors commonly used for online traffic maps is analysed to determine conditions that usually lead to trouble.

For example, congestion at a certain off-ramp or bridge entrance may consistently lead to traffic backing up in another area. The results are combined to form personalised predictions of when a motorist is apt to run into highway headaches.

"We wanted to take advantage of analytic tools to provide predictive capabilities; to get correlations with minor slowdowns and major ones that happen after that," Day told AFP. So you can run a query at any point for a journey and predict 35 or 40 minutes in advance what it will look like, then couple that with a personal approach for the individual traveler."

IBM researchers worked with California state highway authorities and a Mobile Millennium Team at the University of Berkeley, California, on the project.

The smartphone application lets people receive customized alerts warning of probable traffic trouble before they set out on commutes or other routine drives.

Cryptogon notes that while this sort of mass monitoring can serve useful purposes, it can also be put to more annoying uses - Data from TomTom Navigation Devices Used by Dutch Police to Set Speed Traps.

Dutch drivers might have wondered how it was that speed traps were always in just the right place to catch speeders. It turned out to be simple enough: if they owned a TomTom, their in-car satnav was spying on them, and the aggregated data about cars’ speed was being sold via the government to the police – who used it to set the traps.

The company, which is Europe’s largest satnav manufacturer, was forced this week into an embarrassing apology as the revelation emerged alongside its first-quarter financial earnings, which showed weak demand and let it to forecast growing sales from “service revenues” – including, it said, selling data to governments.

In a public apology (repeated in a video on YouTube), TomTom’s chief executive Harold Goddijn said the company sold the anonymous data believing it would be used to improve safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks.

“We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it,” he wrote, and promised licensing agreements would “prevent this type of use in the future.”

Normally the aggregated data would be used to tell subscribers to TomTom services how to route around traffic conditions and give improved estimates of journey time. The sale of data to the government was intended to help it understand causes of congestion and accidents.

But the police had a simpler idea for how to use the data to offset the cost of buying it, and followed that as well.

The timing of the admission comes just after a wave of concern over data collected by smartphones and passed back to the companies controlling them, such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Todd Woody at The New York Times has an article on smart water meters in the US midwest - Smart Water Meters Catch On in Iowa.

While some California cities move to ban smart electricity meters over fears about their impact on human health, residents of Dubuque, Iowa, are embracing smart water meters.

Like smart electricity meters, smart water meters measure consumption and wirelessly transmit the data to utilities. In Dubuque, 311 households have volunteered to have smart water meters installed as part of a pilot project between the city and I.B.M. to see if giving residents information on their water use in real time will prompt them to conserve. The project is also intended to help city officials spot and repair leaks in the water system as they happen.

“The more frequently water use is monitored, the more quickly things like leaks can be detected and addressed,” Milind Naphade, program director for I.B.M.’s smarter city services, said in an e-mail. “Also, we’ll be able to better identify trends and patterns over time more quickly with this frequency.”

Many water bills are issued quarterly, so residents may not notice a spike in consumption as a result of leaks or other problems for months. The smart meters in Dubuque, on the other hand, will transmit data on a home’s water use to I.B.M. computers every 15 minutes.

Residents can go to a Web site to monitor their water use. ...

Cutting water use also saves the city energy costs as less electricity is needed for pumping, city officials noted. “What our volunteer households are accomplishing is the first step to understanding waste and ultimately the conservation of valuable resources to sustain life quality for generations to come,” Dubuque’s mayor, Roy D. Buol, said in a statement.

The pilot project began in September and will continue until December, I.B.M said. In the longer term, the city of 60,000 plans to roll out smart water meters to all of its households as part of a sustainability initiative called Dubuque 2.0.

SMartMeters.com reports that IBM has joined the consortium building a pilot smart grid project in NSW - IBM Joins Australian Grid Project.

IBM has joined the $100 million Smart Grid, Smart City initiative as the systems integration partner. In addition to IBM, the EnergyAustralia Consortium consists of GE Energy Australia; AGL, Sydney Water, Hunter Water and Newcastle City Council. Under terms of an agreement with EnergyAustralia, IBM will deliver distributed generation, smart metering, and demand management solutions for what is Australia’s first smart grid network. The three-year project will test smart grid technologies in up to 50,000 NSW households.

The Smart Grid Smart City agreement calls for the installation of smart meters in the Hunter Valley and Sydney. Up to 20,000 houses will be equipped with in-home displays that enable consumers to track their energy use. Residents in ten percent of these homes will be able to control their energy devices using mobile devices such as the iPhone.

Glen Boreham, Managing Director of IBM Australia & New Zealand, called the Smart Grid, Smart City demonstration “a critical step in developing the necessary infrastructure meeting the energy demands of Australian citizens into the future. One of IBM’s key priorities is to help utility companies transform energy, environmental and sustainability issues into opportunities that positively impact the world. Being a member of the consortium that will carry out this project is a reflection of IBM’s commitment to the energy industry and our vision for a smarter planet.”

While I quite like IBM's "smarter planet" marketing campaign and the use of advanced analytics in applications like smart grids, this particular use of data analysis seems rather evil. From Gizmodo - Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It's a Very Bad Idea.

IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here's the full quote from Deepak Advani:

Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.

If that sounds scary to you, that's because it is. First it's the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it's the potential terrorists. Then it's everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.

It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.

The reality is that it's not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that's not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn't end well for more than 11 million people.

And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is the wrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.

The NYT has an article on solar powered desalination in Saudi Arabia, somewhat surprisingly using concentrating solar PV (CPV) rather than solar thermal energy - I.B.M. and Saudi Researchers Collaborate on Solar-Powered Desalination Technology.

I.B.M. and a Saudi Arabian research institute are collaborating to develop a desalination plant powered by a new type of solar technology. The goal is to build a desalination project in the Saudi city of Al Khafji capable of producing 7.9 million gallons of water a day that would supply 100,000 people.

Desalination is an energy-intensive process, which has limited the deployment of such plants outside desert regions like the Middle East. But I.B.M. and the Saudi research institute, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, plan to dramatically reduce the electricity costs by building a 10-megawatt solar farm that deploys ultra-high concentrator photovoltaic arrays.

The technology will concentrate the sun 1,500 times on a solar cell to boost efficiency. That's about three times the solar concentration of most concentrating photovoltaic panels currently in operation.

Sharon Nunes, vice president of I.B.M.'s Big Green Innovations division, said in an interview Tuesday that the key to increasing the solar panels' efficiency was a device called a liquid metal thermal interface. A legacy of Big Blue's mainframe computer work, the liquid metal thermal interface acts as a heat sink to cool the extreme temperatures generated by concentrating photovoltaic systems.

"The solar component is something we've been implementing and that we have done testing on for the past two years," Ms. Nunes said. "We're quite confident with the results.

I.B.M. has not yet revealed the efficiency of such a solar system at
converting sunlight into electricity. But Jenny Hunter, a company
spokeswoman, said it was expected to be a significant increase over
current concentrating photovoltaic technology.

I.B.M. has had discussions with solar developers about using the
technology, Ms. Nunes said.

The researchers are still exploring options to run the plant when the sun is not shining, looking at technologies to store solar electricity as well conventional power sources. To further cut energy costs, the company and Saudi researchers said they had developed a nanomembrane that desalinates water and removes toxins while using less
electricity.

Earth2Tech has an article on IBM's involvement in Chinese smart grid initiatives - IBM’s Chinese Smart Grid Ambitions.

When Forbes reported in November that IBM was launching a major utility and energy research lab in China and planned up to nine big smart grid projects in the country, it came as little surprise to many. After all, China is going to be spending much more than the U.S. or Europe on building out its grid to meet its massive population’s growing energy needs — a fact that’s drawn other grid giants like General Electric, ABB and Siemens into the country as well. IBM has already said that it expects to generate $400 million in smart grid revenues in China over the next four years. What’s it planning to do to earn the money?

On Thursday, IBM drew back the curtain a bit on its Energy & Utilities Solutions Lab, including details of various pilot projects underway with China’s massive government-owned utility, State Grid Corporation of China and other partners. Those projects range from managing the flow of power from nuclear plants and massive wind farms to transmission and distribution grids — similar to the work IBM does for utilities in the U.S. and in Europe — to some smart grid realms where IBM has made less of a splash, such as managing energy efficiency down at the consumer level, including electric vehicles.

“We’ve expanded from smart grid, to look at the energy value chain, from the supply source all the way down to the consumer source,” is how Bradley Gammons, IBM’s vice president of energy and utilities sales and distribution, put it to us in a phone interview from Beijing. In particular Gammons said that IBM has been looking more closely at the consumer and the role the consumer will play as a dispatchable demand response resource as they adopt electric vehicles. China is expected to see half the world’s installations of electric vehicle chargers over the coming years, according to Pike Research.

Smart grid industry watchers will no doubt be keeping an eye on which Chinese smart grid companies IBM chooses to partners with. The Chinese government requires that its wind power projects have at least 70 percent made-in-China components, and observers have noted that State Grid and other massive government-owned utilities will be making similar pushes to help domestic companies get a piece of the smart grid pie.

Gammons noted that State Grid has already announced technology standards for manufacturers who want to build some of the 170 million smart meters it wants to deploy over the coming years. While U.S. smart meter makers including Itron and Echelon are eying that market, major Chinese meter makers such as Jiangsu Linyang Electronics, Ningbo Sanxing Technology and Wasion Group will no doubt be contenders as well.

On the other hand, some industry observers have noted that giants like IBM, GE, Siemens, Cisco and Hewlett Packard may have a leg up on the Chinese competition when it comes to cutting-edge smart grid technologies — particularly in the “system of systems” integration projects that IBM specializes in.

Bruce has a post on IBM's efforts to get into the "internet of things" market - Spime Watch: IBM and Internet of Things. As usual, Bruce's interjections are marked with ((( ))) pairings.

((( The thing that’s endearing about IBM is their deployment of real money. Like, megatons of money. Plus swarms of real-world machinery and thousands of actual engineers. )))

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_internet_of_things.php

(…)

“I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.

“IBM is involved in some very interesting projects at the intersection of two big trends we’ve been tracking in 2009: The Real-time Web and Internet of Things. They have a website devoted to this topic, called A Smarter Planet. As the name implies, it focuses on environmental matters such as energy and food systems. Sensors, RFID tags and real-time messaging software are major parts of IBM’s smarter planet strategy.

(((I like the idea of a multinational corporation with a “smarter planet strategy.” Decent of them to realize they don’t get an extra planet after dominating one of them.)))

“The catchcry for the site - Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent - is about outfitting the world with sensors and hooking them to the Internet to apply the ’smarts.’

“IBM has a whole set of RFID and sensor technology solutions. But more importantly it has been busy working with various manufacturers and goods suppliers in recent months, to introduce those solutions to the world.

“This month IBM made an agreement with Matiq, an IT subsidiary of Norway’s largest food supplier Nortura. The project involves using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology to track and trace poultry and meat products “from the farm, through the supply chain, to supermarket shelves.” This food tracking solution will help ensure that meat and chicken are “kept in optimal condition throughout the supply chain.” The system uses IBM’s WebSphere RFID Information Center, together with IBM’s sensor and actuator solutions.

“A similar project is one that IBM announced at the end of June with Danish transportation company Container Centralen. By February 2010, Container Centralen undertakes to use IBM sensor technology “to allow participants in the horticultural supply chain to track the progress of shipments as they move from growers to wholesalers and retailers across 40 countries in Europe.”

“Specifically this refers to transportation of things like flowers and pot plants, (((no, no, not actual “pot plants,” that’s more of a Californian cottage-industry thing))) which are very sensitive to the environment they travel in. Having sensors as part of the entire travel chain will allow participants to monitor conditions and climate during travel. Essentially it makes the travel process very transparent… (((etc etc etc)))

Bruce also has a look at the emerging market for tinfoil hats for passports - Arphid Watch: Passport Sleeves.

((( Haven’t had any arphid news on BEYOND THE BEYOND in a while. Not because we lost interest in RFID, but because the technology itself looks snafu’d. As the technology ages, its original headlong tech impetus is unable to overcome its many poorly-designed deployments. )))

((( Here’s the Obama State Department shrugging about their RFID train wreck, and hoping nobody notices that the previous Administration installed zillions of terror-friendly radio beacons in the purses and pockets of the American civil population. )))

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/11/AR2009071101929_pf.html

“…when the sleeves come off, “you’re essentially saying to the world, ‘Come and read what’s in my wallet,’” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

“By obliging Americans to use these sleeves, he says, the government has, in effect, shifted the burden of privacy protection to the citizen. (…)”

((( Well, yeah; the State Department installed the arphids in there, and if you’re worried about that, they don’t mind if you now go buy and install your own tinfoil hat. Up to you. Pal, voter.)))

((( Given their mournful fait accompli on the ground, they probably lack any rational alternative, except to INSIST that everybody go buy some tinfoil hat for their passport, in which case the Global War on Terror situation looks even more aggressively crazy than it was before. Not to mention the tremendous publicity boon for RFID hackers seeking employment with terrorist hotel-bomber types, who’d no doubt love to bug any doorway anywhere on earth, and automatically count the vulnerable foreigners walking through it. )))

((( Also, according to the original genius plan, you were supposed to be using these safe-and-secure arphid beacons to merrily zip through airports, en-masse, subway-style, like with Oyster cards. Seen any of that jolly high-tech activity anywhere lately? Me neither. Instead we’ve created a huge, botched superpower effort that is paranoid, semi-secret, global in scale, leaky in security and at best semi-functional. “Gothic High-Tech.” )))

(((Later: George Mokray write in:)))

“I’ve been making my own duct tape wallets (and notebook covers) for years. My most recent credit card came with an RFID chip so I decided to make my next wallet with an aluminized mylar substrate from a potato chip bag rather than the paper I used to use. My assumption is that the aluminized mylar will dampen the RFID signal. My passport was renewed just before RFID chips became standard issue, thanks to your head’s up. The wallet is wearing well, better than the old paper and duct tape ones.

“Doing a Tuvan throat singing workshop at NE Conservatory the next couple of days with actual Tuvan artists, Allash. South African choral music all day Saturday. Ain’t globalization grand.

“Solar IS Civil Defense,
George Mokray”

(((Great job with the duct tape potato chip bag Tuvan throat-singing solar arphid wallet, George. Always great hearing from you; you are our kind of people.)))

And one last item from Bruce - The Gothic “Ghost Properties” of the London Rich.

At an abandoned home with yellowing newspapers on its front stoop, Paul Palmer peeks through a mail slot to find letters and leaves carpeting the entryway. The house next door has a dead plant chained to its porch, which is covered in faded utility bills.

Mr. Palmer investigates abandoned homes for a living. But his turf isn’t a poverty-stricken corner of this financial capital. It’s the Mayfair district, home to wealthy financiers, celebrities, the U.S. Embassy — and a few squatters. (((<— Is it necessary for me to point this little arrow at the “squatters,” or are you catching on yet?)))

In the city of Westminster, where Mayfair is located, homes can cost up to £50 million ($81 million). Yet Westminster is fifth among London’s 33 boroughs in the number of unoccupied properties. In 2008, 1,737 homes had been vacant six months or more, the third highest number among all London boroughs, according to the Empty Homes Agency, a nonprofit group that seeks to put empty homes back into use. (((I wonder where the Empty Homes Agency gets their NGO funding, because they’re gonna be busy guys.)))

Unlike people facing foreclosures in other neighborhoods around the world, Mayfair’s homeowners aren’t down on their luck. Rather, the properties serve as investments for owners who pay the bills to keep them empty — something the neighbors and city object to when the homes fall into disrepair. (((It’s hard to conceive of a practice more Gothic than this — it’s a financial practice for human shelter that evicts human beings and then destroys the homes through entropy. Wait, I can think of one financial practice even more spooky and extreme: profitably burning dead fossil fuels so that the *entire planet* becomes humanly uninhabitable.)))

Many owners decline to rent the homes due to local council tax rules, which tax properties at a lower rate if they are empty and unfurnished. That loophole frustrates Mr. Palmer. “We shouldn’t be rewarding these people,” he says. (((Can’t blame capitalism all the time, especially in the Wall Street Journal. Posh neighborhoods inhumanly determined to keep up property values can also regulate themselves right out of human existence.)))

As the Westminster City Council’s empty-property officer, Mr. Palmer strolls the area’s streets six hours each day to identify vacant homes and track down their owners. Under British law, local authorities have the power to seek an order to claim ownership of the ghost properties and put them up for sale….

BusinessGreen reports that Malta will become the world's first island covered with a smart grid, with IBM to install 250,000 smart meters - Malta's Smart Grid.

Malta has contracted IBM to install a £70m smart utility grid and replace 250,000 analogue electricity and water meters with smart meters by 2012.

The Maltese National Electricity and Water Utilities Enemalta and Water Services Corporation (WSC) says the deal will also include advanced IT applications enabling utilities to remotely monitor and suspend meters, as well as allowing consumers more choice over their tariffs.

Smart grids are considered vital to improving the energy efficiency of electricity grids in Europe, some of which date back to the 1960s. They allow utilities to monitor demand much more accurately, saving on emissions by not having to over-estimate electricity use, and identifying more accurate patterns of use.

“This agreement will not just transform Enemalta’s metering operations but will also help us introduce new back-office applications to provide an unprecedented customer relations service,” said Enemalta’s chief executive Karl Camilleri. “With the right infrastructure in place to distribute electricity on the national grid, we are looking at ways to optimise current operations as well as open up potentially new, untapped markets in the way we conduct our business operations.”

The utilities will save money by not having to employ meter readers, and by identifying problems with the grid much more quickly.

Customers will have an internet window to their technical and commercial data, to track current consumption and choose the most appropriate tariffs. The implementation of an advanced automated meter-management system will also allow the firm to improve its water loss-management initiatives.

The conservatives recently outlined plans to invest £1bn in a smart grid in Britain.

Tyler Hamilton has a post at Clean Break on proposals to build a smart grid in Ontario - Task force: spend $1.6 billion on Ontario smart grid over five years.

It’s been a long-time coming, but finally the electricity sector in Ontario has taken a close look at what a smart grid might look like and what it will take to get us there. The Ontario Smart Grid Forum, made up of electricity sector executives and officials, released a white paper this week that, among other things, recommended that the province spend $320 million annually for the next five years on smart grid technology deployment — and that’s above and beyond existing budget allocations for grid maintenance, expansion and smart meter deployment.

It would be a decent chunk of change, at least measured against the pittance the federal government has allocated for the entire country — that is, some unknown portion of a $1 billion “green” fund spread over five years. In the United States, a stimulus bill under discussion would devote $11 billion (U.S.) over two years. ...

David McFadden, an energy lawyer and a member of the task force, said the province is leading the continent with smart meter deployments but shouldn’t, at this critical juncture, rest on its laurels. Smart meters, he said, are but one small — albeit significant piece — of a much larger, more powerful puzzle. “What we should be doing is moving rapidly and taking a real lead in terms of systems, technology, software, all the way through the entire electricity system,” said McFadden

Now we’re talking. Fact is, Ontario has many things it can leverage — a world-class transmission utility, a diverse power mix, a strategy to shut down coal plants, and a commitment to renewables. We also have a strong telecommunications and IT heritage that, combined with our expertise in traditional energy fields, could be used to make Ontario a clear leader in smart-grid development. All it needs now is a comprehensive plan, a vision behind it, and a commitment from both government and the private sector to come together and make it happen. It could become a significant source of job creation for the province, and a significant path to export opportunities.

Earth2Tech notes that while smart grids are now getting a lot of attention, smart grid companies may struggle this year - Even With Stimulus, Smart Grid Could Face Rough Year.

The smart grid might have launched into the mainstream lexicon recently with GE’s super bowl ad and funding included in the current stimulus package, but the budding industry could falter out of the gate in this economic climate. Smart grid companies are showing some concern over utilities slowing down smart grid rollout plans in the near term, and the stimulus package is actually just a drop in the bucket of the investment needed to launch a nationwide smart grid. ...

Earlier this week, analysts at UBS downgraded Itron, a heavyweight smart meter maker, and said while the company: “may receive new [advanced metering infrastructure] awards at some point in 2009, we believe this is balanced with a risk that ‘09 guidance is revised downwards at some point due to utility capex cuts and/or AMI project delays.” ...

And while the industry is pointing to the $4.5 billion boost in smart grid funding in the proposed stimulus package (both the House and Senate versions), those funds are actually a small percent of what a national smart grid network would need. Ed Legge, an analyst with the Edison Electric Institute, told us that at least $50 billion is needed for all the investor-owned utilities (which make up 70 percent of the U.S. utilities) to roll out smart grid networks. It would cost about $500 million for each utility, Legge said. That’s a substantial investment for a utility that is facing reduced their demand for energy from customers.

Still, “there is a lot of optimism” around smart grid rollouts these days, said Legge, adding that “the technology is moving forward, not backward.” Utilities like Pepco Holdings and CenterPoint announced smart grid plans just this week. Eric Miller, Chief Solutions Officer, for Trilliant, a company that makes hardware and software for smart meters, says while he’s heard his industry’s concern over a slower rollout, his company is still seeing “a high level of market activity.”

But it’s the sudden positivity and excitement over power grid 2.0, that actually makes the economic downturn particularly frustrating. Companies have waited for years for the smart grid to be hot enough to excite consumers, investors, utilities and policymakers — who thought in 2008 that smart grid would get a Super Bowl ad and repeated mentions from the president? Hopefully the current recession won’t pull the rug out from under the industry in one of its shining moments.

Greentech Media has a column on the importance of standards as smart grids become more widespread - Smart Grid: A Matter of Standards.

How open should the smart grid's communication and networking infrastructure be? And what's the definition of "open" communications standards in the first place?

As a host of utilities and smart meter companies turn to companies to help them network millions of smart meters being deployed across the nation, these questions are coming to the fore.

Radio frequency mesh networks like those provided by smart meter makers Itron, Elster, Landis+Gyr and others – as well as the Internet protocol (IP)-based system from startup Silver Spring Networks – are coming under indirect criticism for their lack of openness by companies like Trilliant, which provide communications based on the ZigBee standard, or SmartSynch, which uses cellular networks from providers like AT&T.

At the same time, Eka Systems, which has developed its own smart meter data communications and networking technology, says that companies like Silver Spring Networks that have built IP networking systems are settling on a standard that, while open, will lead to problems with increasingly complex data communications needs to come in the future.

Who's right – or perhaps more importantly, which point of view utilities and regulators adopt – could play a big role in who succeeds in the emerging smart grid industry.

The subject is a hotly discussed one at the DistribuTech conference in San Diego this week, when companies spanning the reach of the smart grid meet to ply their wares and state the case for their technologies

Tyler Hamilton has a post at the Energy Collective on prospects for smart grids in 2009 - Smart grid destined for role as enabler of renewables, efficiency, and distributed generation.

I’m encouraged by many of the end-of-year stories coming out of the greentech community. Most of them argue that the “smart grid” will be a major story in 2009, and as my own year-end musings show I couldn’t agree more. In fact, my final story of the year is about the smart grid and its inevitable coming into being. Much of my story is through the seasoned eyes of Marzio Pozzuoli, founder and CEO of Woodbridge, Ontario-based RuggedCom Inc., the leading supplier of hardened communications gear to utilities around the world. In other words, RuggedCom sells routers, switches and wireless equipments for electrical substations. As more of this gear is installed we begin to see the grid as an extensive two-way communications network, able to collect and transmit information to where it’s needed.

The next step? Creating the software and setting up the systems that can organize, analyze and ultimately act on the information collected in a way that improves the efficiency, reliability and self-healing capability of our electricity system and makes integration of renewables and distributed generation much easier. No wonder the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and other giants of the IT sector are beginning to take notice and position themselves in what promises to be a massive market.

From Tyler's article in The Star - Transforming dumb network into smart grid.

Before the Internet there were small private networks that connected PCs, and before these networks were stand-alone computers incapable of sharing information.

And before the computer? We had the trusty old typewriter.

Looking forward, the technological evolution that in three decades moved us from the mechanical typewriter to Internet-connected computer is destined to be repeated in the move to modernize the continent's antiquated electricity system, experts say.

The goal: turn a dumb network of lines and electromechanical devices that is heavily reliant on human intervention into an efficient, two-way, automated "smart grid" that collects, shares and acts on information to manage the flow of electrons.

It's a transition already underway, and for good reason. The transformer devices in a typical electrical substation – that is, a point on the grid where power is converted from a higher to lower voltage (or the reverse) – are designed to last 40 years. The average age of transformers in North America is currently 42.

"You've got this aging infrastructure that isn't going away, and you can't just say you're not going to replace it. There's no choice but to replace it," says Marzio Pozzuoli, founder and CEO of Woodbridge-based RuggedCom Inc.

And that might come sooner than expected. President-elect Barack Obama has promised a major economic stimulus package that includes substantial investment in the U.S. transmission infrastructure, including smart-grid technologies. Similar talk is occurring around the world, including Canada, and companies such as RuggedCom are primed to benefit. "It all looks good for us," Pozzuoli says.

Joel Makower has a post at The Energy Collective on IBM's smart grid aspirations - Behind IBM's Quest for a 'Smarter Planet'.

IBM's recent campaign goes well beyond mere image — and beyond green — to envision a "smarter" world in which problems as wide-ranging as health care costs, energy and resource shortages, government inefficiency, threatened waterways, climate change, and traffic congestion can be addressed by a blend of systems thinking, technological innovation, and computing power. It's an intriguing campaign aimed at helping redefine IBM from its roots as a computer maker to its more recent incarnation as a self-described "global services company."

"Smarter Planet" isn't IBM's first foray into the green scene. In 2007, the company launched a program called Big Green Innovations to mine the company's vast wealth of expertise and technology to create products and services to help address customers' and society's environmental challenges. Big Green, a play on the company's longtime nickname, Big Blue, takes aim at everything from creating carbon dashboards to help lower companies' carbon emissions, to designing energy efficient data centers and more powerful solar cells. But it seemed more of an inward-looking effort, an attempt to collaborate with existing clients, and not a means of communicating with the marketplace. (You can listen to a 2007 interview I did on the topic with Sharon Nunes, who heads the Big Green Innovations program, and Wayne Balta, IBM's VP of Corporate Environmental Affairs.)

Recently, I talked to Rich Lechner, IBM's VP of Energy & Environment, and John Kennedy, its VP of Integrated Marketing Communications, to learn more about the "Smarter Planet" series — what was behind the ads and what the company hopes to accomplish from them. ... Lechner described the many environmental challenges that, he says, could be solved by "smarter" systems:

"In a world in which water, energy, power are severely constrained, you don't have to look far to see, for example, that only 30 percent of the potential electricity that's available at the energy source actually reaches the doorstep of the consumer. Or that significant amounts of traffic congestion are caused just by people circling, looking for empty parking spaces, wasting fuel. You can look at our distribution systems around the world and see that more than 20 percent of all the shipping containers and more than 25 percent of the trucks moving around on a global basis are empty. You look at the way that food is distributed and understand that the average carrot in the United States — the lowly carrot — has traveled 1,600 miles to get to your dinner table, and you say clearly something could be done to improve the efficiency of our food distribution system. And water: We're projecting that over a billion people won't have access to safe drinking water in just ten years time, and yet today, just five food and beverage companies consume enough water on an annual basis to serve the daily needs of everyone on the planet.

"We looked around and we said there's plenty of room for improvement and our expertise in IT [information technology] coupled with our deep industry knowledge and our ability to look at and re-engineer processes gave us a unique vantage point to comment on the need to exploit this growing intelligence and where the first opportunities for exploitation might exist."

The vision for "Smarter Planet" was laid out in a November 17, 2008, speech by IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. "The world will continue to become smaller, flatter ... and smarter," he said. "We are moving into the age of the globally integrated and intelligent economy, society and planet. The question is, what will we do with that?"

The "Smarter Planet" ads — what Kennedy calls an "op-ad" campaign — are Palmisano's answer. They are designed "to get a reader to think about the world from a systems point of view, and along the way, describe these opportunities for systems," says Kennedy. Each week's ads cover a different topic: energy, traffic, food, infrastructure, retail, banking, and more.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on efforts to redcue energy consumption in large data centres, now being actively promoted by hardware companies like IBM and HP - Cutting Tech's Energy Bill.

International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other big computer makers are spotting opportunity in customers' desire to curb electricity usage in large corporate data centers, where energy use has soared in recent years.

Rising electricity prices, coupled with new computer servers that run hotter and require more power, has corporate technology buyers looking for ways to cut back. Power use in data centers -- the large, climate-controlled rooms that house a company's computer servers, storage devices and communications switches -- doubled from 2000 to 2006 and now accounts for about 1.5% of U.S. electricity consumption, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A recent McKinsey & Co. report says that world-wide, the centers' carbon emissions exceed those of Argentina.

Somewhat ironically, the companies that designed and sold those computers are now able to capitalize on the higher power bills the machines rack up.

IBM surprised Wall Street this year when it said its new "Green Data-Center Services" business -- which redesigns customers' data centers and sells energy-efficient products -- signed $300 million in orders in the 2007 fourth quarter. The company has declined to release figures for 2008.

IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano recently told analysts that IBM expects more than 70% of the world's biggest companies "will modify their data centers significantly in the next five years" to deal with energy shortfalls and rising costs.

The Nanosolar company blog has a post on their fast thin-film solar printing process.

As we are busy ramping our operation, we almost forgot to recognize achieving a major milestone in solar technology: The solar industry’s first 1GW production tool. Here it is:

Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?

This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.

Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.

Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.

Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)

CNet reports that IBM is also getting into the thin-film solar market, in partnership with Japanese company Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK).

The computing giant on Monday is expected to announce a deal with a Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer to make thin-film solar cells from CIGS, a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide.

Neither IBM nor its partner, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK), plan to manufacture cells themselves. Rather, they will develop technology that can be licensed to solar companies in two or three years, said Supratik Guha, lead scientist for photovoltaics at IBM Research.

IBM has already built a prototype device. Once made at large volumes on a glass substrate, the cells are expected to deliver electricity at less than one dollar per watt at peak times--a long-held target of many solar outfits.

"We have the skills that we have developed in other areas--standard silicon semiconductors, materials chemistry--and we're looking to utilize those skills in the photovoltaic space and develop IP (intellectual property) and know-how that other people don't have," Guha said.

Traditional solar cells are made from silicon, but alternative thin-film materials are becoming a larger share of the market. Thin-film cells are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity than silicon, but they require much less material to produce a cell, making them cost-competitive. Solar high-flier First Solar sells thin-film cells from cadmium telluride.

CIGS is a material that a number of companies are betting on, including Nanosolar, Global Solar Energy, Miasole, and Heliovolt. These companies are not producing cells at large volumes yet, but use of CIGS is expected to catch on quickly next year as their factories come online.

"CIGS will be the big story of 2009 because we know how many companies are putting in multimegawatts of CIGS (production capacity) in 2009," predicted solar expert Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, who spoke at a recent Greentech Media solar briefing.

IBM's CIGS manufacturing technique came out of research IBM had done about 10 years ago in flexible electronics.

It's a break with the most common CIGS manufacturing process, called co-evaporation, in which active chemicals are immersed in a solution that gets removed in a vacuum.

IBM's "solution-based processing" calls for the chemicals to be dissolved in a liquid and then dried. It does not require a vacuum, doesn't require as much energy to run, and can be done faster than co-evaporation, Guha said.

IBM is also looking to leap-frog existing CIGS manufacturers on efficiency with a target of about 15 percent.

The efficiency of the CIGS cells on the market now is at about 9 percent or 10 percent. HelioVolt recently announced that it hit 12.2 percent efficiency with a process that is faster than co-evaporation. Global Solar said it expects to get to 14 percent, eventually.

The record for efficiency was done by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (NREL) earlier this year, which reached 19.9 percent efficiency through a co-evaporation process.