Too much intelligence at the edge of a network, and not enough in the middle, makes for a volatile network. That’s according to Ray Gogel, president and chief operating officer of the Current Group, quoted in a Forbes article this morning.

Gogel says a lot of the attention so far on the smart grid has been focused on “the edge” of the network — power generation and consumer energy consumption — and he’s worried that if there are too many nodes (renewable energy, smart meters) added at the edges of the network before the middle of the grid can catch up, in terms of intelligence, it will make for a volatile smart grid. The situation “scares utility people like myself,” he tells Forbes.

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We had a blast at our smart grid bunker event this week, and we wanted to share the videos with any folks that weren’t able to tune into the live stream. Thank you to all of our thought-leader speakers — Andy Tang, PG&E Senior Director of the Smart Energy Web, Warren Weiss, Partner Foundation Capital, John O’Farrell, EVP Global Business Development, Silver Spring Networks, Darren Brady, Chief Operating Officer, EnerNOC, and John Steinberg, CEO EcoFactor — as well as our amazing audience who brought great questions. We’ll bring you more analysis later today.

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This morning we’ll be live video streaming of an exclusive event at our office in downtown San Francisco, featuring a group of thought leaders discussing what will be the killer applications for the smart grid and what needs to happen to drive the future of these innovative applications. We’ll have close to 100 of the industry’s top execs for this town-hall style event, and the discussion will be led by:

• Andy Tang, PG&E Senior Director of the Smart Energy Web
• Warren Weiss, Partner Foundation Capital
• John O’Farrell, EVP Global Business Development, Silver Spring Networks
• Darren Brady, Chief Operating Officer, EnerNOC
• John Steinberg, CEO EcoFactor

Tune in to our live feed below! And if you would like to ask questions please submit them to twitter #e2tbunker. Check out GigaOM Pro for our post event wrap-up.

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What will be the killer applications of the smart grid? Wouldn’t we all like to know, but we’re offering Earth2Tech readers a chance to peer into the closest thing we’ve got to a crystal ball. On Thursday morning (starting at 9:30AM PST) we’ll be featuring a live-streaming video feed right here on Earth2Tech.com of an event we’re hosting that will dig into the next generation of smart grid applications, and the ecosystem that will foster these applications. Five thought leaders — Andy Tang, senior director of PG&E’s Smart Energy Web, Scott Lang, CEO of Silver Spring Networks, Warren Weiss, partner at Foundation Capital, John Steinberg, CEO of EcoFactor, and Darren Brady, Chief Operating Officer of EnerNOC — will discuss the future of smart grid applications, and a live audience of about 75 executives will weigh in with their thoughts.

We just closed the registration to attend in person, but watching the live feed will let you learn a whole lot from the comfort of your couch (or office, or cafe). And we’d also like to hear questions from our virtual audience, so please submit them into the comment section of this post between now and Thursday morning and I’ll try to get them answered during the session. During the event on Thursday morning, please submit questions via Twitter with the tag #e2tbunker and we’ll have an Earth2Tech staffer monitoring those goodies. Come tune in on Thursday and learn about the future of the smart grid.

On the morning of January 28, we’re holding an exclusive event at our office in San Francisco that will take a close look at the next generation of smart grid applications. Here’s the idea: Now that smart grid infrastructure is being built out, what new applications will ride on top — providing services like home and commercial building energy management, smart EV charging, next-gen demand response and billing — and what is needed to promote innovative applications and deliver a truly smart grid?

This is an invite-only event, but we do have a small number of seats still available for entrepreneurs, innovators, investors and utility execs that have strong opinions and would like to participate. This will be a town-hall style event, where the discussion is led by a group of thought leaders, but the audience will be actively participating and it will be live-streamed online.

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While 2009 was the year that startups, smart grid firms and venture capitalists decided to move into the home energy management market, 2010 could be the year that the consumer electronics players make their moves. Energy reseller Direct Energy and a group of gadget heavyweights, including appliance maker Whirlpool, retail group Best Buy, and gadget developer OpenPeak, tell us they plan to launch a home energy management device dubbed the Home Energy Management (HEM) center at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show on January 7.

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While we’d love to think it’s our smart analysis of greentech businesses, our savvy scoops and our winning personalities that drive your clicks, here’s a clue into what you like reading. . . . lists! So here’s our obligatory end-of-the-year top 10 list of the most popular posts on 2009 — and yes, it is dominated by all those lists: smart grid, home energy management tools, solar thermal, algae fuel, cellulosic ethanol.

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My article 5 Reasons Wi-Fi Will Take a Back Seat for the Smart Grid stirred up a lot of debate in wireless circles — while some agreed with it and some pointed out reasons they felt I’d overlooked, others flat-out disagreed with what I wrote. Among them was the Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade group whose white paper I cited in the story. To that end, Greg Ennis, Wi-Fi Alliance’s technical director, presented me with the group’s own list of reasons why, as he put it, “Wi-Fi will succeed for smart grid deployments.” They are:

1. Huge installed base: An estimated 2 billion Wi-Fi chipsets have shipped as of this year. One of every 10 people in the world uses Wi-Fi for work and leisure.

2. Economies of scale: Like many semiconductor-based technologies, the growth in the market for Wi-Fi chipsets has driven increasing volumes and generated lower prices. This year more than 500 million Wi-Fi chipsets will ship and one billion units are expected to ship in 2011.

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In a long speech on a variety of greentech subjects — ranging from renewable energy technology to prospects for the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate’s slow pace on the climate bill  — former Vice President and current Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore singled out the smart grid as a key initiative that will help the U.S. transition off of foreign oil, create jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gore made the comments at the GreenBeat conference, which is focused on the smart grid industry. Kleiner Perkins, it should be said, has invested in smart grid companies including Silver Spring Networks. So Gore had a variety of reasons to champion the smart grid today.

Gore highlighted three benefits that the smart grid will provide: a connection to link renewable assets to areas that need it, a way to empower consumers, and a way to drive technology innovation in much the same way the Internet has done. When comparing the Internet to the smart grid Gore said, “the analogy is almost exact.” The energy industry is moving toward a distributed model (solar rooftops and devices at endpoints), from a highly centralized one now. Eventually, Gore predicted the power grid will look more like the distributed model of the Internet.

Arguably, said Gore, the most important effects of the smart grid buildout will be the potential benefits for consumers, who will finally become aware of how much energy they are using and find new options for reducing energy consumption. “Most people are simply not aware of ways to reduce consumption,” he said. Andy Tang, senior director of PG&E Smart Energy Web expressed a similar sentiment on the panel prior to Gore’s speech concerning just how big the change in mentality about energy consumption will be. Tang said many even in the utility industry are just beginning to grasp the large effect that a digital grid will have on consumers.

Image courtesy of World Economic Forum flickr Creative Commons (not from GreenBeat)

Duke Energy, a utility that has 4 million customers across the Midwest and the Carolinas, doesn’t want to be in the business of selling and making consumer electronics. The utility is not interested in helping sell iPhones, selecting the devices that consumers want to use for energy management, or rolling out trucks to neighborhoods to repair gadgets, explained Duke CTO David Mohler at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy conference this morning. Instead Duke is working on getting the smart grid network buildout right, and “opening up the end of the wire to products and new services and letting other players get into interacting around energy with our customers.” In this way, Mohler said, Duke hopes to “let a thousand flowers bloom” at the edge of the network.

In other words, Duke plans to enable its customers to choose from a variety of home devices and services that will be developed by third parties, including startups, consumer electronics makers and software developers. “This is one of the most exciting areas ,” said Mohler, adding that he doesn’t think we’ll even know what possible innovations will emerge at the edge of the network. In that way it’ll be like the early days of the Internet, said Mohler: “Who knew the Internet would produce the iPhone?”

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