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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“Oil is finite, but information is infinite,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said a year ago in a talk for the New America Foundation. Fortunately, we have online tools to organize and manage that information, sometimes in the interest of reducing oil consumption, as well as emissions and fuel expenses for drivers. The California Air Resources Board has just launched such a web-based tool, with its revamped DriveClean Buying Guide.

Announced Thursday afternoon, the web site allows users to compare vehicles based on Global Warming and Smog scores — snapshots of how a car’s fuel consumption, carbon-equivalent emissions and contribution to smog (through production of certain volatile organic compounds) compares to all other vehicles in that model year. By state law, these scores now appear on an Environmental Performance label displayed in the window of cars manufactured since January 2009 and brought to market in California. Now they’re also available online in a ranking system similar to the side-by-side comparison tools offered by the federal FuelEconomy.gov site and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Vehicle Guide, but with a couple key differences, including increased emphasis on vehicles’ contribution to climate change (relative to FuelEconomy.gov, at least), more integration of rebate an incentive info and a more slick interface.

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Electronics and liquids don’t mix, unless you’re Iceotope. At this week’s Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore., the 3-year-old startup from Sheffield, UK is demonstrating a liquid-cooled server setup that has the potential to cut data center cooling costs by up to 93 percent. The firm just came out of stealth mode, 18 months after a round of financing in early 2008 from EV Group. Plans call for Iceotope to begin manufacturing this year with an eye toward getting the system to early access participants by Q1 2010, general availability sometime in the second half of 2010.

Considering that cooling IT systems is responsible for 40-60 percent of a typical data center’s yearly spending on electricity, the company is clearly betting that the energy savings alone will be enough to drum up business. Instead of supplying rack doors with chilled water to cool servers like IBM, or affixing “water blocks” to processors and other heat-generating components of a server to siphon off heat, Iceotope dunks entire server motherboards into modules that are filled with an “inert liquid” that doesn’t short out the delicate electronics.

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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.

President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao this week launched a joint effort to “reduce oil dependency, cut greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic growth” through accelerated deployment of electric vehicles — an effort that needn’t exist in opposition to “green mobility efforts.” Nor should it overplay the role of personal vehicles as a solution to the challenges of fast-growing urban centers, warns energy and transportation scholar Lee Schipper in the Dot Earth blog today.

A strong push for plug-in cars in the world’s two largest auto markets might sound like just what the planet ordered. “Virtually all of the emerging markets have economies that are booming,” venture capitalist Steve Westly said at the Cleantech Open awards event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and it’s oil that’s driving them. But getting off oil and onto electricity isn’t the only goal, Schipper tells Dot Earth. “Energy is only a means to an end. What are the ends, urban access and mobility, or cars for a small minority?”

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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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“Aptera’s production and delivery will be tied directly to funding,” said Aptera Motors CEO Paul Wilbur in a release from the ultra high-efficiency vehicle startup late yesterday. That very mild assessment belies the reality that Aptera is peering across the Valley of Death, where many ventures die for lack of funding at the critical commercial development phase. According to the release, dwindling cash reserves are forcing the company to delay production of its inaugural vehicle, the three-wheeled electric 2e, until 2010 rather than the end of this year as previously announced.

Hitting the new 2010 target (or any future production goal for that matter), will require Aptera to bring in fresh capital, and it’s banking on either a federal loan or private investment to come through. At this point, the company is shifting its focus away from development, which “has been outpacing the rate of fundraising.” The company has laid off an undisclosed number of employees, co-founder Steve Fambro is taking an extended vacation (he’ll return in the new year), and Chris Anthony, the other co-founder, is “stepping aside from day-to-day activities” — all in an effort, Aptera says, to slow the burn rate and free up resources for top priorities: raising cash and starting volume production of the 2e.

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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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