But the quarter wasn’t all about the smart grid. Battery companies — focused both on vehicles and consumer electronics — fared well, drawing attention from venture capitalists, the government and larger companies looking at batteries as a good business to be in. A123 Systems’ IPO was the big story in batteries this quarter, and it actually exceeded expectations. Lithium-ion batteries — the technology of choice for the upcoming generation of electric vehicles — have gained enough momentum to spark concerns about limited lithium resources.

Talk of going “beyond lithium” began in earnest this quarter, too. As companies race to bring down costs and boost the performance of li-ion, others are looking ahead to other technologies (such as the experimental lithium-air tech discussed at IBM’s conference).

Stimulus funds also gave a big boost to plug-in electric vehicles this quarter as several hundred million dollars were allocated for charging infrastructure projects, and new smart charging technologies were unveiled. Meanwhile, Big Oil was going nuts for algae, with Exxon, Chevron and BP all making major investments in algae-based fuels. Biofuels in general seem to be coming back from the dead a bit; in addition to all the algae interest, several venture firms made funding announcements this quarter tied to the space.

While everyone’s a little concerned about what happens “beyond stimulus,” solar and wind have the most to worry about: When federal funds and state grants leave town, there’s still no one standing there willing to take on the financial burden of project financing for large-scale renewable energy projects.

A more in-depth look at these trends and others is available in the latest Quarterly Wrap-ups in our five focus areas — NewNet, Mobile, Green IT, Connected Consumer, and Infrastructure. These quarterly reviews are available to GigaOM Pro subscribers, along with dozens of detailed research briefings and in-depth articles on specific topics in each of these areas. You can subscribe here.

Existing communication and data networks (using IP) will enable vehicles to “smart charge,” delaying battery charging until favorable conditions on the grid (including the cost of energy) exist. According to a new GigaOm report, “IT and Networking Issues for the Electric Vehicle Market,” (subscription required) utilities alone will spend upwards of $800 million on IT to prepare the grid for vehicle charging.

Many of the pioneers in the PC and Internet industries will play a significant role in driving the innovation, along with some new players specializing in vehicle-grid communications. Last week, vehicle battery services company Better Place announced it had recruited both Microsoft and Intel to aid in the development of EV communications technology. Startup Coulomb Technologies is rolling out EV charging equipment loaded with software for upcoming vehicles including Daimler’s plug-in Smart.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, technologies and protocols developed to enable computers, mobile phones and other devices to interact online will be adapted to EV IT. Mobile phone networks, such as those run by AT&T and Sprint, will be utilized for wireless communications, according to the report.

Most of these standards for communications between vehicles and grid equipment, home-networking devices such as smart meters, and charging stations are either in the early stages of development or are yet to be written. This provides an opportunity for companies to get involved now.

Innovations for connecting onboard vehicle computers to electric cars, (like those announced by Audi), will be extended to other vehicles, upping the overall level of vehicle intelligence. Similarly, Ford will add EV-specific communications features to its SYNC platform as part of its larger plan for transportation IT.

The U.S. government is supporting IT development EVs by funding research as well as smart charging infrastructure. The House of Representatives this week passed a bill that would go further than the Obama administration’s stimulus funding, authorizing $2.9 billion over five years for advanced vehicle technologies, including information technology.

John Gartner is an analyst with Pike Research, editor in chief of MatterNetwork.com, and a member of the GigaOM Pro Analyst Network. His latest report, “IT and Networking Issues for the Electric Vehicle Market,” examines these issues in more detail.

Image courtesy of Flickr MR38.

There are several driving factors contributing to this urgency for energy reform. Speedy spending on shovel-ready energy infrastructure can help jump-start our declining economy — $43 billion of stimulus spending has been earmarked for energy. Current world energy resources, especially oil, are getting expensive, running out, and in the hands of people who want to kill us. Catastrophic global warming is accelerating because of carbon dioxide released into Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal and oil, and it’s probably already too late to save life, as we know it. President Obama’s political honeymoon will soon be over, so it’s now or never.

Hurry! That’s what I hear anyway. Perhaps that’s more urgency than energy can stand.

Energy Networking

Solving the energy dilemma may require some public awareness, lobbying, compromise, laws, regulations, subsidies, taxes and international treaties. It will surely require a lot of science, including physics, chemistry, biology, and math, engineering, certainly thermodynamics, as well as decades of time. But, if 63 years of Internet history are any guide, delivering cheap and clean energy in the coming decades will become easier the sooner we get right…the networking.

“Smart grid” is the current buzzword for energy networking. Everyone in Washington seems to be in on it, and let’s hope they get some entrepreneurs involved. About $4.5 billion in energy stimulus spending is earmarked for developing the smart grid. This now generally means adding intelligence — computers, software, sensors, controllers, databases, data networking — to our national electricity network of wires, towers, transformers, poles, and meters, making them smart.

The current “dumb grid” is running out of capacity, fragile, vulnerable, in the wrong places to well serve intermittent renewable energy sources, and terribly inefficient. The smart grid is the low-hanging fruit in solving energy. Hurry!

There is a federal inter-agency Smart Grid Task Force (SGTF), the members of which include the United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). SGTF is also consulting with some of the 50 state public utility commissions (PUCs). I imagine that at some point the United Nations (UN) will show up. Just in case you think these are all the acronyms you’ll have to learn in energy networking, not even close, but it’s a start.

The FCC’s Role

The good news is that another acronym, our Federal Communications Commission (FCC), chaired by Julius Genachowski, has now entered the energy-networking fray. Before, SGTF seemed to think it was the FCC’s job just to dedicate some electromagnetic spectrum through which energy utilities could send their smart grid radio communications. Genachowski, egged on by Congress, has a somewhat more expansive view of the FCC’s role in energy networking, and more power to him.

Congress has asked the FCC to deliver a national broadband plan on February 17, 2010. The plan must include smart grid broadband for energy independence and efficiency. With this deadline looming, the FCC has been busy recruiting and gathering input. It has formally asked for smart grid comments back on Oct. 2, and if you think you might want to contribute your smart grid ideas — hurry!

Remember, from Internet history, it was the FCC that in 1968 issued the Carterfone decision. The FCC opened up the AT&T monopoly telephone network to attachment of non-AT&;T devices, for example, mobile phones and later this whole Internet thing. Fierce competition among innovative entrepreneurial teams — not AT&T, not IBM, not FCC — did the rest. Let’s hope the FCC will rise to this occasion by helping get energy networking right. Let’s help it. Hurry!

For example, if the Internet is any guide, it is far from clear that the FCC should dedicate spectrum to smart grid networking. Encouraging electric utilities to communicate on their own dedicated radio frequencies could easily end up creating what we Internet people disparagingly call “silos.” Hey, the Department of Agriculture knows about silos — time to get USDA into SGTF?

Lessons from the Internet

Instead of creating network silos for electricity, there’s already a national broadband infrastructure, the Internet, so wouldn’t it be better for any smart grid(s) to use the Internet? If the Internet lacks features required by the smart grid, wouldn’t it be better to improve the Internet rather than start over with something sold by lobbyists as shovel-ready? Here’s where excessive urgency plays into the hands of the status quo. Don’t hurry.

The FCC and its friends bring to SGTF more networking expertise than we are likely to get from power plant operators or meter readers. Consider this Internet history lesson: In the 1980s, General Motors (GM) proposed its own local broadband networking alternative to my Ethernet. It argued that network customers, not network experts, know best what they need and how to build it. GM developed and promoted a non-Ethernet silo just for industrial networking — the GM Token Bus. But, as the histories of Ethernet, Token Bus (RIP), and GM have all shown, GM should have stuck to making cars.

The smart grid, like the Internet, needs a network architecture — there’s art in that. Such architectures need the right number of enduring standards, fewer to maximize interoperability, but more to enable specialization, to span diverse requirements, and to expedite technological evolution. Networking experts know best how to do this; we’ve been practicing on the Internet for 63 years (since the invention of the transistor).

The smart grid needs more than expedient silos, even more than artful networking. The smart grid needs inter-networking. The Internet now “internetworks” (connects various networks) including computer access, email, telephone, television, commerce, finance, advertising, news, travel, books, music, videos… and social networking (like my thoughts on Twitter). Hopefully, soon health care will be done over the Internet.

A Smart Intergrid

Internet history strongly suggests that the smart grid will eventually have to interconnect grids carrying various forms of electricity, other energy transport grids (like gas pipelines), water grids, transportation grids (like roads for electric cars), and of course the Internet’s various information grids, soon including new grids for distributed energy management inside buildings.

What we’ll need, to coin a phrase, is “the Intergrid.”

Internet history also indicates that various new forms of energy storage will need to be networked in and around the Intergrid. There will be increasing variability, much of it unpredictable, among energy sources (like wind and solar), among more diverse and efficient energy uses, and among transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure. New technologies, none shovel-ready right now, will be needed for providing storage to mediate among these variabilities.

Which leads back to one last networking acronym, IETF. The Internet Engineering Task Force should be invited to play a more active role in developing the smart grid, the Intergrid. Vint Cerf, known as the father of the Internet and who’s now at Google, says the smart grid should follow in the Internet’s footsteps. And he’s right, again.

So, go now to the FCC’s site if you think you might want to contribute your smart grid ideas before Oct. 2. Hurry!

Mr. Metcalfe is a venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, Mass. He founded 3Com Corp. and proposed Metcalfe’s Law. He is a trustee of MIT and received the National Medal of Technology “for leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.”

For more on Mr. Metcalfe’s ideas about energy networking (or EnerNet) watch his presentation at our Green:Net ‘09 conference.

As the first federal stimulus funds began to make their way across the country, second quarter saw a slight thawing of investor pocketbooks when it came to cleantech.

Smart Grid

The smart grid, in particular, continued to attract both media buzz and venture capital investors (who couldn’t seem to contain their excitement over finding cleantech investments that looked just like traditional IT plays: low capital, quick return, little to no technology risk). In fact, there was so much interest in the consumer-facing software component of the smart grid — home energy management systems — that there is already talk of a “bubble” in that space. Which was not enough to keep software giant Microsoft from making noise in the home-energy realm.

On the networking and utility-facing software fronts, infotech leaders Cisco and Oracle also threw their sizeable hats into the smart-grid ring in second quarter, both with solutions aimed at utilities: Cisco on the networking and communications front and Oracle with a software package to help utilities integrate with smart meters, balance system loads, respond to outages, manage customer billing and offer time-of-use pricing.

The two primary issues hanging over the smart grid space continue to be energy storage and a lack of standards for interoperability. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is so far on-track to meet its ambitious September 2009 deadline to resolve the standards issue, and many industry watchers were relieved to see that the first batch of standards (released in second quarter) mirrored those that already dominate the industry. The energy storage problem is farther from a resolution, but a few promising startups emerged this quarter with potential solutions.

Plug-In Vehicles

Meanwhile, second quarter saw more leaps forward in the plug-in vehicle space, including several corporate fleet agreement announcements and a number of funding announcements for battery startups. Tesla also (finally) secured a much-needed Department of Energy loan plus a “double-digit million-dollar” investment from Daimler, while Ford and Nissan both banked DOE loans for electric vehicle programs, and Chrysler teamed up with A123 Systems after GM canceled its deal with the battery startup in favor of a deal with rival Sakti3.

Clean Power

Solar and wind picked up slightly from first quarter, and while both sectors continue to struggle in the face of massive decreases in capital investments, as well as valuations and deal volume, analysts predict a better year ahead in 2010. Biofuels are still on a downward spiral, with more bankruptcy announcements crossing the wire in second quarter as Congress debated the merits of holding biofuel producers accountable for their carbon emissions, but there may be light at the end of the tunnel for next-generation biofuels thanks to federal mandates.

Policy

On that note, the United States got closer than it ever has been to putting a price on carbon — a hugely important policy in terms of support for the cleantech industry — when the Waxman-Markey bill passed the House of Representatives late in second quarter. Though historic, the House passage doesn’t guarantee a U.S. carbon law or market — not by a long shot. There remains a Senate vote on that chamber’s version of the bill; passage there would be followed by discussion between the chambers on what the final bill will be, and then decisions from various federal organizations about how to interpret climate legislation.

The full report, which examines these themes in more depth, is available to subscribers of GigaOM Pro, along with Quarterly Wrap-ups in our other focus areas: Mobile, Connected Consumer and Infrastructure. GigaOM Pro subscribers also get access to dozens of detailed research briefings on specific topics.

Since the launch of the agreement in 2005, some 500 more cities have signed on (and counting). And while some cities just signed the document and moved on, others have used the initiative to draft further innovative strategies that deliver meaningful reductions. The most effective strategies, by far, have been those that bring sustainability initiatives into the office of economic development and turn the city into an early adopter of “green” products and services. It’s exactly this sort of strategy that makes the following cities the best in the country to be a cleantech start-up. In a report, Living Cities Foundation interviewed sustainability directors and gathered data from city sustainability departments throughout the country. We’ve landed on the following seven as the best spots to start and grow a cleantech company (more interviews from the report here).

• San Jose
• Boston
• Austin
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Portland
• Denver

First up: San Jose »

Image credit: arimoore.

We have a choice. Invest in safe, renewable forms of ocean energy — including wind, wave, tidal and current power — that will help secure our future prosperity, create thousands of new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Alternatively, we can continue to give tax breaks to oil companies that pollute our oceans and keep us locked in a carbon age.

The stakes are high. Oil companies are lining up to cash in on a Bush Administration proposal to offer petroleum development in 1.7 billion acres of formerly protected coastlines, including 136 million acres off the coast of California. This proposal represents a huge step backward. Our country has finally woken up to the need for a green energy future. Now we need to invest in the technology to make America the world leader in renewable energy.

Offshore wind power is one promising source of energy that is commercially viable today. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimate that the wind off America’s coast could generate nearly 1,000 gigawatts — a little more than the current U.S. electrical capacity.

Ocean power, while not as developed, is every bit as promising. California has more than 745 miles of coastline, and every mile has daily energy transfers in the form of waves, tides and current. Estimates vary, but experts suggest that more than a quarter of California’s energy demand could be met by technology that harnesses these forms of ocean energy. Economic projections indicate that ocean energy could become cost-competitive over the long term if governmental leadership exists to encourage investment in these technologies.

Over 100 years ago, Adolph Sutro, the 24th mayor of San Francisco, recognized the power of San Francisco’s waves, building a wave catch-basin that he hoped to one day turn into a wave-powered “overtopping” system near Cliff House.

Today in San Francisco, we’re not just talking about ocean power, we are advancing its actual implementation. We have submitted an application to the federal government to develop an underwater wave project off San Francisco’s Ocean Beach that could generate between 30MW and 100MW of power. And we are actively working to develop a tidal power demonstration project in the San Francisco Bay that demonstrates the promise of technologies that capture tides.

Before we move forward with ocean energy projects, there are environmental concerns that must be addressed. We need to avoid impacts on marine habitats, releases from foreign material into the water (such as hydraulic fluids), and visual and noise impacts to coastal residents.

Federal leadership on ocean energy is crucial because virtually every site where ocean power is likely to be tested or deployed is subject to federal jurisdiction. Unlike conventional wind and solar, ocean power cannot be tested or deployed on private land. The industry will only emerge and mature in the U.S. if the federal government uses its position to advance the technology.

Federal government action should include:

1. Federal policies to facilitate ocean power demonstration projects as a first step toward commercial development of ocean power.

2. FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and MMS (Minerals Management Service) should resolve their jurisdictional dispute and clarify their respective authorities for regulation of ocean energy. This is already underway.

3. Federal and state regulatory agencies should compile existing information on ocean power (data collected to date, etc.) into a publicly accessible common library.

4. Beginning in 2009, federal and state governments should vastly increase R&D to study, monitor and report on common impacts of ocean energy so that these issues can be efficiently addressed for each project.

5. State and federal regulatory policy should explicitly encourage pilot and demonstration-scale projects under permitting conditions, which assure protection of ocean resources.

6. Federal and state regulatory agencies should prepare a unified environmental document for each application for deployment of demonstration projects, and should otherwise coordinate their permitting procedures.

7. Decisions on individual applications should advance the public interest by increasing renewable generation capacity and effectively protecting the affected ocean resources.

Faced with a choice between a downward spiral of environmental degradation and increased reliance on a finite resource or investing in safe, renewable energy that can power our country and save our planet, the choice should be clear.

Listen to San Francisco Mayor Newsom’s Green 960 radio show online or subscribe to his weekly policy discussions on iTunes. You can also join him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.

Empowering consumers with actionable intelligence about their power will not be the outcome of the deployment of smart meters. Rather, it will be exactly what the utilities intend for it to be: a cost-effective way to implement real-time pricing, demand side management and distribution system monitoring.

Why? The buyer and seller of electricity have opposite power consumption interests. We (buyers) want to have control over the total power we consume and independent confirmation we are getting what we pay for. Electric utilities (sellers) seek to maximize the profits from a business model that requires them to generate, transport and deliver a consistent quality of power — regardless of demand — in exchange for a guaranteed rate of return.

Electricity generated on the power grid isn’t stored, so the grid is engineered and operated to meet peak levels of demand, which might only exist for a few hours per month. Without control over demand, responding to demand spikes will cause the quality of power supplied to fluctuate outside accepted norms, i.e., delivered voltage lags outside the 5 percent acceptable quality band, or frequency fluctuates outside its 2 percent quality band. That can only change if demand can be controlled, so utilities want three things from smart meters:

1. To protect their return on investment (ROI) by not reducing the total amount of electricity sold.
2. To free up supply reserved for unpredicted variations in peak demand with direct load control. (If the utility was granted direct control over devices with the highest amperage — the air conditioner (40 amps) and the hot water heater (30 amps) — it could shed 70 percent of the average consumer load, temporarily reducing consumption.)
3. To reshape the demand curve, shifting demand from the peak busy hours to when demand can be met with baseload power (peak load shaving).

Metering has never been intended to reduce overall consumption.

A smart meter could report on whole house electricity usage, but it could not report on the demand from individual household devices. To make intelligent decisions about energy use, measurement should take place at the outlet, in the device or even on the power cable connecting the device to the outlet. This information can also track the quality of the power being delivered, which can affect the life of the device. Current, temperature and time data could be collected inexpensively, using existing technology, and transmitted over an Internet connection to one of the many service providers with a business intelligence platform. This data can be mined to reveal power quality issues that affect consumption. For example, a low voltage reading will tell you that the device will need to draw more current, increasing the total power cost for that device. Or if your dishwasher were drawing a current for longer than similar appliances, that could alert consumers that a maintenance check is in order.

While price signals, along with consumer education, might have an effect on total demand, they could also have an unintended consequence: If a drop in the price per kilowatt-hour becomes the key indicator of when to run the dishwasher, hot water heater and washing machine, then using it may actually increase total carbon emissions because the cheapest electricity today is mostly from coal. By using more electricity when it’s cheapest, we’ll burn more coal.

There is little doubt that smart metering will meet the utilities’ needs, and perhaps facilitate whole house measurement for the buyer. But direct device monitoring is a simple, inexpensive way to effect a shift from a grid blind to demand and engineered to meet peak demand to smart customers who can manage the way their power is delivered.

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But now 3M is working on a new material that can make lithium-ion batteries for such products as power tools, laptops and cars lighter. Here’s how it works: Because batteries are comprised of several cells, they typically require an electronic system to keep the cells balanced. “If one cell is doing more than another, you get a disbalance and then your battery won’t charge right,” explains Chris Milker, business manager at 3M.

3M’s new material allows this cell supervision to happen chemically instead of electronically, greatly reducing the weight and size of the battery. It’s called a “shuttle technology,” because the materials contains a chemical “shuttle” to help the cells remain balanced for longer and extend the life of the battery, according to Milker.

The company is currently qualifying its chemical shuttle technology for power tool batteries and plans to commercialize the technology in laptop batteries, cell phone batteries, and potentially automotive batteries within a year. If it works as well as 3M claims, we may see the company get in on a little large-scale storage battery action down the road, which would dovetail nicely with its solar and wind projects.

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A few years ago I retrofitted my home to run mostly on solar power, and was rewarded for doing so with a generous subsidy that amounted to about half the cost of the system. Such subsidies did much to stimulate demand for solar technology, and are being phased out as the industry approaches parity with other power sources.

A similar program could enable us to get a “two-for-one” deal by stimulating demand for electric and serial hybrid vehicles, while also rewarding car companies for ramping up their production capacity. While electric vehicles are more economically viable than they were in the 1990s, they are still substantially more expensive than conventional cars. In a severe recession, demand for new vehicles overall will soften, and for expensive vehicles, even more so.

Of course, there are already subsidy programs of various types for green vehicles, and the recently proposed stimulus package includes $200 million for grant program for electric vehicles. But this idea is meant to encourage people to book orders now, so manufacturers can book revenue in 2009 and invest in production in 2010 and beyond, essentially a way of breaking the bottleneck that’s caused car sales to drop like a rock this past year.

One way to get around this chicken-or-the-egg dilemma is to create a rebate program where customers can book orders for electric and serial hybrids for future delivery, with the government providing a substantial subsidy to encourage consumers to book orders. The program could work something like this:

• The customer books an order, making a small downpayment that may be spread over the time from order to delivery, zero down if they have good credit.
• The government pays 25 percent of its rebate to the car manufacturer on signing, the remaining 75 percent on delivery.
• The customer starts paying the remainder of the balance on delivery, of course, and has the option to transfer the order to someone else if they are unable to afford the vehicle at delivery.
• The car maker’s risk of producing too many vehicles is offset by the initial 25 percent payment (although this risk is probably minimal since these vehicles will still be in scarce supply relative to other classes).

The logic here is to encourage people to book orders for vehicles that will not be delivered in quantity before 2010 or later, but also not defer the decision because they are unable to buy a vehicle now or are concerned that they may be out of work in the future. A program like this would be a simple way to jump-start orders, finance investments in electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle production, and immediately put people to work in the auto industry. It would also give auto companies the ability to forecast actual demand for these vehicles, and encourage them to accelerate their migration to electric/hybrid platforms. What it would not do is reward them for simply doing more of the same — the biggest risk of any blank-check approach.

The auto industry can and should become more like that of technology. Rewarding technological innovation like this could do a lot to push the industry in the right direction while encouraging the car companies to invest in facilities and people in the near-term to ramp up for mass production when the economy recovers in 2010 and beyond.

The 45-page report, entitled “Toward a Just and Sustainable Solar Energy Industry,” notes that, to solve the problem, panel manufacturers need to adopt “extended producer responsibility,” including take-back programs and environmental best practices now, while the solar industry is still in a nascent stage. As we’ve pointed out before, reclamation programs are a low priority for solar startups that are typically focused more on raising capital and building production, and many of those that do exist are in the pilot phase. Sheila Davis, executive director of the SVTC, tells us that panel makers “should look at this as an opportunity, not an economic hindrance.”

As a practical matter, solar panel makers could see cost benefits from reclaiming discarded panels; some of the materials used to make them — such as telluride and indium — are quite rare (and expensive). Some forward-thinking solar panel makers, such as AVA Solar and First Solar, have developed take-back programs where they set aside a certain amount of money from each panel sale to build up a reclamation fund.

Davis says the experience of the consumer electronics industry should help solar manufacturers understand the need to develop take-back programs early on. Solar panels carry some of the same e-waste issues as other discarded electronic devices, such as computers and video monitors, but the consumer electronics industry had to go back and develop costly programs to retrieve and recycle old products after their hazards became known, explains Davis. The solar industry should use the lesson to develop those best practices now. “There’s a tremendous opportunity here,” Davis says, “There aren’t that many solar panels coming to end of life, so they actually have an opportunity to set up recycling systems.”

Beyond urging the solar industry to adopt a sustainability ethic now, the report hopes public policy will support that effort. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned on a proposal to invest $15 billion in renewable energy projects and some of that money should go toward promoting sustainable solar technology, says David Levine, principal of the company Green Harvest Technologies, which promotes the development of eco-friendly products and is an adviser to the SVTC report. He says federal subsidies should support true green energy instead of polluting clean energy.

The report also itemizes the environmental hazards associated with various chemicals used to make PV cells, as well as the risks they pose to solar workers, the hazardous waste byproducts and the potential risks of disposal at the end of a panel’s typical 20-25 year life span.