The enormous task of setting smart grid standards has been at the top of the industry’s list for months. Now there’s a similar type of effort underway for data specifically related to monitoring solar. An industry group dubbed the SunSpec Alliance will officially launch on Tuesday at the Intersolar North America conference, where it will detail its plan to set standards for representing basic solar information, such as current, voltage and temperature, starting with the Modbus protocol for devices such as inverters, meters and other measurement devices.

The new group is made up of firms particularly interested in managing and monitoring solar data. It includes renewable energy-monitoring company Fat Spaniel; inverter manufacturer SMA; solar project developer Nautilus Solar Energy; Veris Industries, which makes energy and environmental sensors; and Campbell Scientific, which makes monitoring and measurement instruments.

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This week, once again, we heard even more noise from both startups and large firms looking to grab a piece of the smart energy home space. On Wednesday dueling announcements emerged from energy management startup Tendril and conglomerate General Electric about a smart appliance partnership, as did a strong showing from home automation startup Control4, which has raised money to connect with utilities and smart meters. But a post from Jesse Berst on SmartGridNews cuts through the press releases and sums up the dilemma of this market quite nicely:

As I’m watching utilities make their first forays into the space, I see most of them driving full speed straight over a cliff. They are piloting HANs [home area networks] and in-home displays (IHDs) that are the worst of both worlds. They have neither the power necessary for utilities nor the sex-appeal demanded by consumers.

The problem is this: Consumers have conflicting demands when it comes to home energy management. In one group are consumers that are actively engaged with their energy management and will want interesting tools — a sleek gadget, a rich interface — in order to take a proactive position in changing their energy consumption behavior. That’s who German utility Yello Strom and Texas energy retailer TXU Energy are counting on to buy their new, fancy energy management tools.

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Less than a year has passed since Quercus Trust and 21Ventures threw down $500,000 in seed money for a small Austin, Texas, startup, Graphene Energy, with a big idea for disrupting the energy storage market. The idea: Develop a technology using graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, with at least twice the storage capacity of commercially available ultracapacitors — devices that have ultra-fast charge and discharge times, but lag far behind batteries in terms of the amount of energy they can store.

Fast-forward six months, and Graphene Energy has used that seed money to make big strides toward its target of achieving twice the storage capacity — at least in the lab. CEO Dileep Agnihotri told us in an interview today that the startup is on track to reach its goal by year’s end. At that point, Agnihotri tells us it expects to raise a new round of investment or secure stimulus funds (the company has applied for grants under ARPA-E and smart grid programs, among others) to help it go into the next phase: taking the technology out of the lab and packaging it into ultracapacitors.

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Free cash from the feds for clean energy, up front — not enough to cover a whole project, but enough to get investors to pony up more. That’s the basic idea of a new stimulus program that the Department of Energy and the Treasury Department have outlined today and which could potentially provide about $3 billion in grants for some 5,000 projects. Rather than waiting around for a tax credit, clean energy developers can apply for grants for up to 30 percent of their project costs (some technologies like geothermal heat pumps and microturbines will qualify for only up to 10 percent of eligible costs), encouraging investors to finance the remainder.

Congress drafted the general framework of this program, described in official language as “cash assistance in lieu of tax credits,” in the Recovery Act. What’s new today is 20 pages worth of guidelines and a sample application form that project developers can use to figure out if they might qualify for the grants, although the feds won’t start actually accepting applications until next month. The Treasury Department’s Michael Mundaca, Acting Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, said in a call with reporters today, “We’re trying to get as much information out as quickly as possible.” But according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, that hasn’t been quick enough.

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Despite all the attention on smart meters as a result of the stimulus package, from fast-moving utilities and even from the likes of Google, don’t expect the market for the technology to grow too quickly in the U.S. According to research and consulting firm ARC Advisory Group, the market for smart meters and the accompanying infrastructure (like wireless networks and management software) will see only limited growth in 2009 and 2010.

After this period of slow going, however, the smart meter technology market in the U.S. is set to ramp up a lot more quickly to $4.69 billion in 2013, up from $1.84 billion in 2008. The total growth of that market over the next five years is actually pretty good — a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 20 percent. It’s just the next two years of more modest growth that might take eager smart meter tech makers by surprise. ARC says the hurdles over the next two years include “immature” standards, piecemeal regulatory authority, and just the fact that it takes awhile for utilities and their vendors to install and build out smart meter infrastructure.

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Thin-film startup SoloPower announced today that CEO Homayoun Talieh has left his position, though he will remain on the company’s board of directors. The announcement came two months after Vice President of Research Rommel Noufi — whose hire SoloPower bragged about last year — exited the company and four months after Director of Operations Richard Colburn left, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Lou DiNardo, a partner with SoloPower investor Crosslink Capital and a semiconductor-manufacturing veteran with operating experience at companies such as Analog Devices, Linear Technology and Intersil, will take over as interim president and CEO.

San Jose, Calif.-based SoloPower, which is developing copper-indium-gallium-selenide cells and panels, gave no explanation for the changes other than to say it is “accelerating into its next stage of growth as it prepares products for market introduction and nears high-volume manufacturing.”

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SolFocus is one of those startups (you’ve got ‘em in every sector) that likes to detail every little bit of funding it raises with press releases. So here’s the latest tally from the company that builds solar power plants that concentrate the sun’s rays onto photovoltaic panels: It’s closed its Series C round at $77.6 million, having added on about $30 million since it first announced the round back in January. That brings the company’s total funds raised to over $170 million.

SolFocus’ latest funds put it in the select group of solar firms — along with companies like Solyndra, SoloPower and Nanosolar — that are amassing hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists. And it doesn’t seem like venture capitalists are getting sick of stuffing money into solar just yet. According to some of the data for the second-quarter cleantech venture capital numbers, solar was still the most capitalized sector, with more than $333.4 million (other research firms put solar investments closer to $114 million).

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German utility Yello Strom (which we declared the world’s coolest utility last week) isn’t the only forward-thinking electricity provider to embrace the intertwining of energy and home broadband connections. While Yello Strom might be leading that revolution, energy company TXU Energy, based in Dallas, is also aggressively moving ahead on leveraging the home broadband connection to help customers manage and reduce energy consumption.

As an energy retailer, TXU Energy has to manage relationships with both energy distributors and consumers, and a couple months ago, the company launched the next generation of its connected thermostat — which benefits both groups. Dubbed iThermostat (first version released last year), the tool hooks into the customer’s home broadband connection and enables people to go online to program and monitor energy consumption related to their heating and cooling. The thermostat, which costs $75 for installation, also has a control function that enables the energy distributor to, say, turn off the air conditioner for a 10- to 15-minute cycle during crucial peak demand times.

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Microgrids — essentially mini, self-contained power grids that often need independent power generation and storage — are of particular interest to the military. Military bases are largely in remote locations and have to be prepared for events that could potentially separate them from the greater power grid. That’s why GE says it has snagged $2 million in stimulus funds from the Department of Defense to build a smart microgrid demo project at the world’s largest U.S. Marine Corps base, Twentynine Palms Base in Twentynine Palms, near Joshua Tree National Park in southern California.

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General Electric has said it could start selling some of its smart appliances — dishwashers, water heaters, microwaves and other devices embedded with communications technology — as early as this summer. But how will those appliances securely and efficiently connect with the grid so that utilities can turn them down during peak electricity hours? One answer will come from Tendril, the 5-year-old Boulder, Colo.-based startup that has developed energy management software and hardware for utilities and consumers. Tendril and GE say this morning that they will co-develop software that will hook GE’s smart appliances up to the grid and the utility back office based on Tendril’s energy management platform.

It’s a big win for Tendril, which announced it raised a third round of funding of $30 million just last month. GE will be Tendril’s first appliance partner, though Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck tells us that the company plans to announce other appliance partners in the future. For GE, the Tendril partnership will bring the startup’s experience of working with — and building software for — utilities and delivering the features that utilities are particularly concerned about: security and privacy of data, cost of the system, and ease of use. Utilities that buy GE and Tendril’s offer will be using Tendril’s energy management system on the back-end.

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