The backlash against the smart meters installed in Texas by utility Oncor doesn’t seem to be dying down. Actually the protesters are getting more organized and turning to social media. A group called Smart UR Citizens — whose members describe themselves as “a group of Texas citizens that are fighting the unrealistic utility charges which we believe are caused by the Smart Meter” — has a new web site, an online petition, an intro video and an online survey, and is inviting community members to submit videos and comments about their experiences.

The small group is also holding rallies outside of Oncor’s headquarters and using social media to get the word out. Dallas Morning News reporter Elizabeth Souder reported in the newspaper’s blog Texas Energy and Environment yesterday that the group was supposed to hold a rally Thursday afternoon — as she put it: “The protesters will be the ones waving red shop flags.”

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Make it familiar and compelling — that’s the idea behind the design of energy management startup Tendril’s new gadget dubbed the Vision, which the company plans to unveil next week. The dashboard, designed by design firm IDEO, and based on the form of a digital clock, is intended to help consumers really engage with managing their energy consumption by using captivating design elements. Because, let’s face it, managing home energy consumption isn’t exactly the sexiest activity. (Read our interview with IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, subscription required).

Tendril’s Scott Ballantyne, Vice President of Marketing, told me that IDEO and Tendril spent eight months studying and researching human behavior in order to create the Vision. They found that by adding design elements like the familiarity of the clock design, they could keep users engaged enough to reduce their energy consumption by an average of 10-15 percent. The Vision is also able to provide real time data for pricing fluctuations (energy rates go up during peak demand times) if a utility is providing that to the customer, which helps a customer manage energy consumption.

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OpenADR — the Berkeley Labs open source system for automating the way utilities do demand response — is already being used to control some 70 megawatts of capacity for big industrial and commercial customers of California’s biggest utilities. Could it expand its reach into homes and small businesses? Mary Ann Piette, research director at Berkeley Labs’ Demand Response Research Center, believes it can and mentioned a list of interested parties on Wednesday during a California Public Utilities Commission workshop in San Francisco.

Energy management startup Tendril Networks has been involved in testing out the possibility of bringing OpenADR, which stands for Open Automated Demand Response, to residential. Sacramento’s utility, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, has tested OpenADR in small business HVAC systems in a way that might offer an analog to connecting home thermostats. Pacific Gas & Electric has also been mulling a test of OpenADR over its smart meter networks, Piette said. (We reached out to PG&E for more details and we’re waiting to hear back).

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The deadline to submit an application for our Green:Net launchpad is just around the corner — this Friday at 5PM! If you’re part of a new startup that leverages information technology — the Internet, computing and communication networks — to help remake the energy industry and fight climate change, submit an application to launch your company or product at our Green:Net conference. Green:Net 2010 will be held on April 29 in San Francisco and will focus on how IT can be used to fight climate change — from the smart grid, to connected cars, to carbon software.

During the Launchpad section of our Green:Net 2010 event 10 hot startups will show off their products on the main stage. The Launchpad winners will receive a lot of visibility — and likely interest from investors. Check out last year’s Judge’s Winner, Wattbot.

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Updated with comments from Google: There’s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. California’s big three utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — have raised plenty of objections to that deadline, and the California Public Utilities Commission is holding a workshop in San Francisco on Friday to talk about it.

The debate, which could influence smart grid policies across the country, underscores an important difference between the two things Google wants utilities to provide — energy “usage” data versus “pricing information.” Electricity usage is a real thing that can be measured in real time with magnets and wires, either by a smart meter or lots of other devices. Electricity prices, on the other hand, are contrived, during or after the fact, by a convoluted market that has to keep demand and supply perfectly balanced at all times. Delivering pricing data in real time will be challenging for smart meter networks as they’re currently being deployed. So in other words, for utilities, delivering power comes first, figuring out who pays for it (and how much) comes later.

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Here’s two unconventional players that could make an influential but unusual team in terms of open standards and innovation for the smart grid: Google and software maker Grid Net. OK, hear me out.

As Grid Net’s new Chief Strategy Officer Andres Carvallo told me last week, Grid Net is looking to build an ecosystem around its vision of a real time, 100-percent Internet Protocol, secure, reliable, scalable, broadband-based smart grid platform. While the wireless standard is the backbone of Grid Net’s first product, Carvallo told me the startup plans to take the core software and explore other technologies as well, including possibly fiber and broadband-over powerline technology.

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For all you broadband junkies, it’s here: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unveiled the first U.S. National Broadband Plan on Tuesday morning. And — what we’re particularly interested in — there’s an entire chapter on Energy and the Environment (Chapter 12, Page 245). The National Broadband Plan looks at how broadband can be used to build out a smarter power grid, make information technology more efficient and make transportation cleaner (the content is very much in line with the speakers and panels at our Green:Net conference in San Francisco on April 29).

Here’s some of the National Broadband Plan’s interesting recommendations on energy and the environment:

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Grid Net, the startup that’s been advocating a smart grid based on the wireless standard WiMAX, has just gotten a new high profile Chief Strategy Officer: Former Austin Energy CIO Andres Carvallo, architect of one of the first smart grids in the U.S. and the man who coined the term “the smart grid” itself. While we reported the news this morning, here’s our edited phone call interview with Carvallo on why he joined Grid Net, what he plans to do for the young startup, and how Grid Net’s vision of the smart grid isn’t just about WiMAX:

Q). Why did you take the role at Grid Net?

AC: At Austin Energy we’ve been drilled into the smart grid for some time — I would call Austin Energy a pioneer for the smart grid. We put a lot of work into putting it all together and as you do all that work you realize there must be a better way. Over the years I learned of so many companies and so many players. Then I met Ray [Ray Bell CEO of Grid Net] and we had some great conversations about the future of the industry and the building blocks, and it was just serendipitous. A lot of what Ray had been working on and what I had wanted to build at Austin Energy had been right on the money. It was clear to me that Ray had already put together a significant portion of my own vision.

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In the world of smart grid, there tends to be two kinds of networks — short range local area networks (LANs) that connect neighborhoods of smart meters together, and bigger-pipe “backhaul” wide-area networks (WANs) to carry that collected data back to the utility. But wait — there’s also a third kind of utility network, a super high-speed, low-latency one that connects the switches, capacitor banks and transformers of the grid (the big machines that push and pull power around the grid, keeping it from blowing up) often with fiber connections at major substations.

Smart meter wireless networking company Trilliant bought long-range wireless provider SkyPilot Networks last May with the goal of bringing all three kinds of networks in-house. On Tuesday, it announced its new bridge products that can link Trilliant’s low-power wireless LANs with its SkyPilot-based, high speed mesh and point-to-point WANs, at latencies low enough to run substation and distribution grid gear as well, according to Eric Miller, senior vice president of solutions. While Trilliant has only a few utility clients, including Canadian utility Milton Hydro, using both LAN and WAN networks right now, Miller said the company intends to go forward selling them as a package.

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Grid Net, the smart meter software startup that’s betting the smart grid will be built around the wireless standard WiMAX, has scored a major hiring coup. This morning the four-year-old firm, led by former Cisco and Silver Spring Network executive Ray Bell, announced that Austin Energy’s well-known Chief Information Officer Andres Carvallo will join Grid Net as its Chief Strategy Officer.

Carvallo is known for helping Austin Energy deploy one of the first smart grid networks in the U.S., and says he originally coined the term “smart grid” back in April 2007. Before he joined Austin Energy to lead its smart grid efforts he was an exec at a variety of start-ups and larger tech firms including Philips Electronics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Borland and Carvallo started his career as a product manager for Microsoft. So returning to the world of Silicon Valley and technology isn’t such a stretch.

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