While we put conglomerate General Electric on our list of “Tech Vendors That Will Cash in On the Smart Grid Stimulus Funds,” we didn’t get the full impact the funds could have on GE in the days after the awards were announced. But the Wall Street Journal’s got that this morning, and says that around a third of the smart grid stimulus awardees are GE customers. The conglomerate, which makes smart meters, smart appliances, and in home energy management products, expects these customers to “use a good chunk of that money to buy its [GE] equipment.” Already, GE has announced utility customers including Florida Power and Light, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Pepco Holdings.

What’s as interesting as the size of the impact of the smart grid stimulus funds on GE, is the method in which GE looked to influence the smart grid stimulus funds. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, a longtime Republican, sits on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board alongside Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr. According to the Journal article, Immelt was a “driving force” behind stimulus funding gains for smart grid initiatives. GE invested $7.55 million in lobbying efforts in the second quarter of this year, a 34 percent increase from the company’s lobbying spending in the prior year second quarter. The investments — in initiatives including promoting the Democratic stimulus package, lobbying for smart grid stimulus fund increases, lobbying for the max smart grid stimulus award to be $200 million, helping customers apply for the stimulus funds, and developing “a colorful two-page fact sheet” on the stimulus for its customers — have apparently paid off.

More specifically GE’s fun-filled fact sheet told its customers that GE would “be involved with setting national standards and energy-transmission policy,” and said that GE could “help regional utilities and governments win federal stimulus money earmarked for making the power grids more efficient,” says the article. Although, GE General Counsel Brackett Denniston III explains that just because GE provided counseling on the Recovery Act legislation “does not ensure its clients will win the resulting contracts.” But with a third of its customers winning the smart grid stimulus funds, clearly GE’s counseling didn’t hurt.

When news breaks that a company is in talks to be acquired, pundits are often quick to point to it as a positive sign. But in reality, it all depends on the valuation and the price of the deal. Over the past couple of days the Financial Times and Reuters have reported that Ausra, the solar thermal startup with a Silicon Valley pedigree, is in talks to be acquired by three potential companies. Both reports cite sources that say the potential buyers are global conglomerates in the power generation business and that the discussions could result in a buyout or a majority investment. No word on a valuation or potential price.

At this point I agree with the Financial Times when it says the news is part of “the consolidation that’s sweeping through the solar industry.” Siemens announced last month that it’s buying solar thermal firm Solel and firms in other solar sectors are being snapped up as well (MEMC Electronic Materials, a company that makes silicon wafers for the solar industry, announced that it plans to buy up SunEdison, a pioneer of the solar as a service business model).

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Amid heated debates over clean power sources, how to build out the smart grid, and the future of advanced transportation, one thing’s clear: Energy storage technology will play a key role in all of these transformations. Energy storage — from batteries to ultracapacitors to pumped hydro to compressed air — will be crucial for the development of electric vehicles, will make sporadic clean power (solar and wind) more reliable, and enable the utilities to more smartly manage power grid loads.

Energy storage provides the key to these innovations and will be the cornerstone of the economy that will emerge around the next generation of energy. Here are three questions for three experts — Rick Luebbe, CEO, EnerG2; Jill Watz, senior adviser, Vulcan Capital; and Ahmad Pesaran, principal engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory — that have spent years digging into the technologies, the chemistries, the economics, and the future hurdles for the deployment of energy storage. The following are edited excerpts of their answers:

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Data center managers aren’t the only ones suddenly charmed by solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing storage needs. A growing number of VCs are also warming to the green, high-performance potential of the storage technology (GigaOM Pro Research, subscription required).

With no moving parts to speak of, a solid-state drive is far and away more energy efficient than its disk-based counterpart, the hard drive. Generally speaking, it also delivers better performance, resulting in a combination that’s proving increasingly attractive to data center operators. That edge helps IT shops overlook storage capacities that fall short of hard drives and helps justify the lofty price tags attached to SSD-based storage systems. It’s also an edge that’s attracting VC investment.

The latest news comes from XtremIO. This week the company announced that it had scored a Series A funding of an undisclosed amount from two Israeli venture firms, Giza and JVP. Heading up this early-stage storage player is CEO Rokach Ehud, with over a decade of experience in the telecommunications industry, including a stint as the CEO of Corrigent Systems, a carrier Ethernet switching provider. Details are scarce (the companies web site says it’s in stealth), but the company’s announcement makes clear that XtremIO has enterprise IT ambitions for its storage systems.

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At this point, the number of creative ways that companies have developed to help home owners monitor and manage their energy consumption, seems to far surpass the volume of consumer interest. That’s OK, though, because the home energy management market is so new, and it’s still unclear which services and technologies will be the most successful. Here’s another new startup which had some funding news this morning: PowerHouse Dynamics, a year-old Newton, Mass.-based company, which has built the energy management tool “eMonitor.”

According to VentureWire, which chatted with the CEO Martin Flusberg at the GreenBuild conference this week, the company is in the process of raising $2 million from undisclosed investors. PowerHouse Chairman and CMO Dan Kaplan confirmed the planned funding with us this morning, and according to a regulatory filing, the company has already raised $225,000 out of a planned $750,000 round.

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On Friday Microsoft plans to announce that its energy management online tool Hohm is now live and available to utility Xcel Energy’s 3.4 million customers. Troy Batterberry, Microsoft’s product unit manager of its Energy Management & Home Automation division, plans to break the news at an event tomorrow at the Microsoft Fargo campus, which is supposed to host the likes of North Dakota Governor John Hoeven, U.S. Congressman Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota Public Service Commissioner Tony Clark, and Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker.

While Microsoft announced that Xcel Energy was one of its utility partners — in addition to Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, and a “half a dozen” utilities in the queue — back when Hohm was revealed in June, the fact that the utility’s large customer footprint can now test out Hohm is a big step for the computing company’s energy tool. The news is also important because it shows how companies are building ways for customers to start monitoring and managing energy consumption before smart meters get installed in larger numbers.

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Despite attempts by companies and industry groups to paint the wireless standard Wi-Fi (the one commonly used within buildings for Internet connections) as a winner for smart grid rollouts, it’s looking like Wi-Fi will end up taking a back seat for the next generation of the digital power grid. This morning the trade group the Wi-Fi Alliance looked to drum up attention for the use of Wi-Fi for the smart grid, and announced the publication of a white paper called “Wi-Fi for the Smart Grid.

While the paper provides interesting information for potential Wi-Fi power grid communication applications, here’s five reasons why Wi-Fi will play a lesser roll for the smart grid, both within the home and further out on the power grid.

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Out of 10 solid greentech startup contenders vying for cash on the East Coast there could only be three winners of the Ignite Clean Energy business competition that took place on Tuesday in Massachusetts. Here they are: third prize, EGG Energy; second prize InnoSepra; and first prize IntAct Labs. The audience-voted People’s Choice Awards went to: third place HydroCoal; second place IntAct Labs; and first place Velkess.

Here’s some details about the winners:

IntAct Labs: IntAct Labs is focusing on the intersection of biotechnology and electronics — an interesting union that doesn’t often get a lot of attention. Possible applications for the company’s technology in that area include a microbial fuel cell — which harvests the excess electrons that bacteria generate as they metabolize organic matter — as well as biosensors and photoactive proteins. The company says its microbial fuel cell can treat wastewater without putting any energy into the system, which could lead to cheaper water treatment technology.

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Berkeley Labs has been working on an open source version of a system for demand response services for the power grid (called openADR) for more than five years. But only one company in that time has commercialized a version of the open source platform — a sign that utilities are very far from embracing open source for the smart grid like many companies in the computing and web words have done.

To solve that problem Berkeley Labs has been working with integration firm Utility Integration Solutions (UISOL) to “kick start” adoption and show utilities a clear way to implement these types of open source solutions, explains Travis Rouillard, UISOL Senior Vice President and project leader. Starting in December UISOL will be testing out an example client and server that will run openADR and by early next year will be offering an openADR package for interested utilities.

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Can an open source data management system do for the smart grid what Google’s open mobile operating system Android is doing for cell phones — spawn innovation and low cost development? Execs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public power provider in the U.S., seem to think so. TVA analyst Josh Patterson says Google’s Android is a good analogy for openPDC, an open source version of a platform that aggregates and processes data about the health of the power grid, and which TVA has helped create. Like Android has done for the mobile industry, openPDC will enable utilities and the power industry to develop their own versions of data management services with more flexibility and at a lower cost than proprietary systems, Patterson points out.

The comparison might be a tad abstract, but I think it holds water. OpenPDC could be as key to the deployment of the smart grid as Android has been for the recent sea-change in the mobile industry (see GigaOM Pro’s report on Google’s Mobile Strategy). As the $3.4 billion in stimulus funds are allocated to the winning utilities, the power industry will be rapidly turning to a variety of methods for collecting, storing and processing the petabytes of data that will be unleashed. While many utilities will want to stick with proprietary systems and already established data management players, early-adopter utilities (particularly outside the U.S.) are starting to look at openPDC for a more economical and flexible approach.

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