By  Peter Edwards, Director, Fairfield and Woods, P.C.

The Colorado Cleantech Industry Association sponsored the first in its “SmartGrid” series on September 30. Aimed at industry stakeholders, this series is in three parts: The Vision, The Technology Challenges and The Policy Challenges. The Vision was hosted by Fairfield and Woods, moderated by your columnist, and attracted well over 100 people, filling the Denver Chamber of Commerce auditorium nearly to capacity.

Keynote Speaker was Luke Clemente, Smart Grid manager, GE Energy Transmission & Distribution business. In his keynote address Luke left no doubt that GE is the incumbent, the reigning royal, the de facto “smart grid company.” If the smart grid is the solar system, GE is the sun. What are the planets? Kitchen appliances, lighting, HVAC equipment, transmission and distribution equipment, batteries, generators, wind turbines, and power management equipment. Indeed, I challenge you to think of any part of the smart grid that GE does NOT offer. (Maybe software.) Luke’s speech set the theme - this isn’t the Internet. This is a land of Industrial Giants, and (unlike IBM’s Internet ennui of the early 1990s) these giants are not ceding the smart grid territory to anyone. By most accounts, the Industrial Giants are: GE, ABB, Siemens, Areva, Mitsubishi and Alstom.

Others on the panel came from every major smart grid discipline except utilities. Utilities, it seems, are exceedingly careful in public about the smart grid. They are, after all, the ones who will be laying out the big dollars that the smart grid will require, and their every move is carefully watched by the Industrial Giants. They also have the most to lose in terms of the financial loss and embarrassment they will suffer if they choose wrongly.

Dick DeBlasio, the Principal Laboratory Program Manager for Distributed Energy and Electric Reliability, had more smart grid experience (32 years) than anyone else on the panel. He was smart grid when smart grid wasn’t cool. Dick lent much-needed reality to the future vision. The federal government’s ARRA aid is $3.9 billion; the smart grid will require, by industry estimates, around $700 billion - and that’s mostly under the heading “upgrading” i.e., enabling the existing system to continue performing satisfactorily despite new pressures an new demands. It does not include expenditures for entirely new technologies and capabilities that are likely to be built into the system.

John LoPorto, CEO of PowerTagging Technologies, Inc., a Colorado startup that recently emerged from stealth mode, talked about his company’s groundbreaking technology for “tagging” electric power. With PowerTagging™, a wind farm could sell its output to specific purchasers, at specific times and prices. This reliability-enhancing technology would also allow independent power producers to sell to specific destinations at market prices, potentially putting a sizeable dent in the utilities’ legal monopolies. It also could be a key piece of carbon management on the national and even global levels.

Tim Enwall, COO and founder of Tendril Networks, Inc., a Colorado startup that recently attracted serious venture financing from the West Coast, explained the vision of a home that is integrated with the entire electrical generation, transmission and distribution system, so that energy efficiency and home management come as easily as programming your TIVO. (Hopefully even more easily than that.)

Carl Lawrence, CEO and founder of Eetrex Incorporated (formerly Hybrids Plus), a Boulder plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) manufacturer and power technology developer, discussed the benefits of having electric vehicles charging at night in our garages, when wind generation is at its peak. Carl’s vision - shared by many of the smart grid’s smartest - is that PHEVs could almost entirely solve the problem of grid storage, enabling all alternative generation technologies to play nicely together. This family of applications would also challenge the smart grid technology as aggressively as any other. With cars plugging-in and unplugging by the millions every hour, the intelligence built into the smart grid would have to perform at its highest and best uses 24×7 to deliver efficient, reliable power.

The panelists were all quite candid in saying that their technology would not and could not go it alone. Key to the smart grid will be the development of standards on which the various manufacturers can rely. A company is not going to spend millions of dollars of developing a product if it runs the risk that other products on the system are incapable of talking to it. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), perhaps the foremost technical organization of any type anywhere in the world, and certainly one of the most credible, has risen to the challenge. Their initiative, called “Project 2030″, aims to facilitate and guide the development of the smart grid for the next 20 years, so that it serves the world’s needs for the next century. That initiative, incidentally, is headed by Dick DeBlasio.

I asked Dick what he thought the smart grid could deliver to us that we might not even be envisioning at this point. Bear in mind that iPods were not introduced until 2001, fourteen years after MP3 research began in a lab in Germany. He answered, of course, that he didn’t know, because we simply don’t know what it is we don’t know - but he did entice us with this: “It’ll have something to do with devices doing things on their own - without anyone telling them to do it.” 

Whew. That’s a scary thought. We’re going to need lots of software programmers who pay more attention to their code than their stock portfolios. If my neighbors’ power goes out because their teenager is playing the music too loud - is that a bug or a feature?