Back when I was a broadband reporter for Red Herring magazine, I took a trip to Seoul and did the classic story on how South Korea kick-started its economy with government investment into blazing-fast broadband pipes that created its world-leading mobile and web industries. South Korea’s broadband buildout may hold some interesting lessons for the U.S. smart grid rollout, as I’ve noted before. But the country could also take a leading role in the smart grid market, with South Korean smart grid firms competing directly against the companies in Silicon Valley that are developing the next-generation of smart grid tools. According to a report today in Reuters, South Korea has picked eight consortiums to build a smart grid test bed in the country and South Korea is vying for “30 percent share of the global smart grid industry.”

In the same way (albeit on a smaller scale) that the South Korean government pumped money into developing broadband infrastructure, the government plans to invest 37 billion won (about $32 million) initially into building out the smart grid test-bed. The companies that will start building the smart grid infrastructure include a who’s-who of South Korean IT companies including mobile leaders SK Telecom and KT, consumer electronics and cell phone heavyweight LG, power companies KEPCO and GS Caltex, and Hyundai Heavy Industries. Taking the same approach as the island nation of Malta — isolating the buildout to a geographical area — the South Korean government plans to build the smart grid test bed on the island of Jeju, which is south of Seoul (see map above).

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Now that large, established players — Silver Spring Networks and Cisco (CSCO) — are building out the smart grid network, the next area for innovation will be the applications, software and services designed to run on top of the network. That’s a trend we’ve covered, and it has been heavily discussed at this week’s GreenBeat conference. As Khosla Ventures partner Vinod Khosla put it today, he’s searching for the Twitters and Facebooks of the smart grid.

Khosla, who has seemed a lot more bearish than many investors in terms of the smart grid (in contrast, Steve Westly, partner at the Westly Group welcomed GreenBeat attendees to bring him their business plans), predicted not many of the next-gen smart grid entrepreneurs in the room would be successful, but that there would be enough winners to make the sector “interesting.” Next-gen applications and services could sprout up in the middle of the grid or at the edge of the network. It’s at the edge where Duke Energy CTO David Mohler said earlier this week he aims to “let thousand flowers bloom.” Here’s 3 companies that have developed next-gen smart grid services that were at the GreenBeat show:

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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)

Cisco has made a ton of noise in the smart grid space — CEO John Chambers told the Wall Street Journal this year that the company had an unlimited budget for smart grid initiatives — but it’s been unclear what exactly Cisco would be selling to utilities. As Laura Ipsen, Senior Vice President of the Smart Grid for Cisco, explained on a panel at the GreenBeat conference today: So far in terms of revenue we’ve been “zero for zero.” But early next year Ipsen says Cisco plans to launch some products directly in the smart grid market.

Ipsen was entirely vague on specifics, but said Cisco sees itself playing at all critical points of the network of the power grid in the areas of “enhancing operations, manageability, and scalability.” You’ll see products from Cisco in those areas early next year, said Ipsen. While Cisco engineers are hard at work on smart grid products, Cisco could also “acquire,” “partner,” with or “invest” in companies developing new tools, she said.

While originally Cisco seemed to be focusing on the home and consumer portion of the smart grid — as it did in its first smart grid deployment with Florida Light and Power, General Electric and network provider Silver Spring Networks — the networking giant is clearly now looking to play across all areas of the smart grid network. Cisco has partnered with Duke Energy on an end-to-end smart grid network, along with several other utilities. While CTOs of utilities will be interested to see what such a large network player has to offer them, we’re guess that all eyes from competitor Silver Spring will be on Cisco’s 2010 launches. Will those products be directly competitive with Silver Springs? We’ll be watching.

We’ve yet to delve too deeply into all of the fisticuffs surrounding the suit filed by a Bakersfield, Calif. resident against utility PG&E for a smart meter that he says tripled his electricity bill. Other residents in the area have complained to the media and PG&E about billing discrepancies. In response, PG&E has slowed down its smart meter deployment in that area. And of course the lawyers are trying to spread the suit down the smart grid supply chain. But from my perspective, and from the position of some of the experts on the panel I moderated last night at the GreenBeat conference, it seems like the whole fiasco offers a lesson about the importance of open communication between utilities and their customers.

Smart grid technology and smart meters don’t represent new or risky or bleeding-edge technology. They use the same type of information technology — wireless networks, silicon, software — that controls our cell phones, computers and Internet, and that plays a massive role in the U.S. economy. It’s just being used in a new industry: electricity. Of course software can occasionally be glitchy, but so can a person manually driving by and reading home meters. As Grid Net CEO Ray Bell told audience members of the GreenBeat conference today “digital meters are rigorously tested, and highly accurate.”

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At VentureBeat’s GreenBeat conference last night, Kleiner Perkins leader John Doerr touched on a lot of the themes he usually does: the necessity of putting a price on carbon, greentech as “the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” and the smart grid being a massive opportunity. But Doerr did make one very interesting statement that stuck in my mind (see Doerr videos from EETimes and the live stream of the event today on FORA.tv): If Kleiner Perkins had seen how bad the market was going to crash it probably wouldn’t have started it’s green initiative:

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Rupert Murdoch’s got a new partner with a Silicon Valley pedigree to help his company News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010: Hara. The media giant plans to announce on Thursday that’s it’s using Hara’s software to track and reduce energy and carbon emissions.

While we all know News Corp — with its vast network of film studios, TV networks, web sites and newspapers — Hara needs an intro for many. Two-year-old Hara only came out of stealth in May of this year with backing from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and follow-on funding from JAFCO Ventures and Nth Power. Hara’s software-as-a-service product gives companies and municipalities the ability to itemize and track all of the inputs (water, electricity, chemicals) and outputs (the product, greenhouse gases, wastewater) that make up their business processes.

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It’s official: New TVs sold in California will be more energy efficient in coming years. The hotly debated state energy efficiency standards for televisions — the first of their kind in the nation — have just been approved by the California Energy Commission (hat tip our friends at sister site NewTeeVee). The standards say that new TVs sold in 2011 (58 inches and smaller) need to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013.

Many TV makers have opposed the rules, while the state’s utilities support it. Groups like the Consumer Electronics Association say that the efficiency standards will result in higher prices of TVs in California, closings of stores that sell TVs in California (because those customers will go online or out of state to buy TVs), and unhappy customers who won’t be able to find certain popular TV models in California because they won’t be economic to produce there. The CEA says that the industry has been getting more energy efficient on its own and doesn’t need regulation, which will lead to “decreased industry competition and less innovation.”

But as Amy Westervelt pointed out over on Solve Climate earlier this week, the ruling could lead to a boost in sales in the state for manufacturers that specialize in energy-efficient screens, using LCDs backlit with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and next generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED). Consumer electronics giants from Sony to LG to Samsung are working on OLED TVs and the technology is supposed to be more widely deployed by 2012 — just in time to meet Cali’s new green TV rule.

While the debate over how — or if — consumers will want to manage their home energy consumption makes a lot of headlines, commercial buildings suck up 18 percent of the total energy consumption in the U.S. and represent one of the biggest opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and carbon reduction. According to Pike Research, the market for energy management systems — stuff like wireless sensor networks, lighting controls, and heating and cooling management in buildings — will turn into a $6.8 billion-a-year market by 2020 and will generate investment of $67.6 billion between 2010 and 2020.

Startups know those metrics pretty well already. Lucid Design Group, for example, has been selling its energy management system for years to the commercial sector, as well as governments and universities. But while the company has always discussed plans to eventually work in the residential market, Lucid Design has yet to make a big push into homes. As Michael Murray, Lucid Design’s CEO, has maintained in conversations with me over the past couple of years, the energy management market for large commercial buildings is much more accessible compared to energy management in homes.

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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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