Energy Management

While much of the smart grid development in Europe mirrors programs underway in North America and other parts of the globe, there are important differences in priorities and emphasis. In particular, aggressive goals for energy efficiency and carbon emissions reductions are major drivers for smart grid and smart meter deployments in Europe. Over the next five to 10 years, these deployments will be closely linked with the achievement of 2020 carbon reduction goals in the European Union.

Sensinode an embedded applications and web service vendor has released two reference applications for machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions developers.  Finnish based Sensinode said the two reference applications; one for the connected home and the other for commercial lighting will help M2M solutions vendors to develop and deploy their solutions faster. The Connected Home application supports automated monitoring and control of electric and electronic devices for energy savings, safety and security.

The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) has found out in a survey of US citizens that consumers weigh society and personal benefits equally when considering Smart Grid technologies.  Market Strategies gathered the findings from the latest Consumer Pulse survey conduct for the SGCC between August and September this year.

For its new range of wireless and home automation products Panasonic has selected Dialog’s DECT  ULE (ultra low energy) Technology.  Its modules are the industry's first commercially available DECT ULE devices.  The DECT  ULE platform forms the core of Dialog's newly introduced SmartPulse wireless sensor network devices.

GE has announced the start of another phase in its "GE Ecomagination Challenge" initiative. Yesterday they and a group venture capital partners launched the second round of funding, titled the "Powering Your Home" phase, where they will be investing up to $63 million in 10 innovative home energy technology companies. Seen as one the Largest open innovation challenge of its kind, so far it has approximately 5,000 submissions from 74,000 innovators.

The Tianjin Eco-City project in China has selected GreenWave to provide the home energy management solution. The project called "The Elegance" is a joint venture between Philippines' Ayala Land and Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development. The GreenWave Reality platform will be implemented to give residents of this modern housing community automation at their fingertips.

Semitech Semiconductor Powerline communication SoC (System-0n-Chip) solution has been selected by GK Smart Energy for European Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) deployment. The Semitech SM6401 chipset will be integrated into the GK Smart Energy Solutions AMI platform, which allows operators to remotely manage smart meters, street lights and connected machines.

Echelon in collaboration with Eltel has won a $16 Million smart grid solutions contract with Demark’s largest utility company NRGi. According to Echelon NRGi has selected their Networked Energy Services (NES) smart grid control system for its customers throughout its services territory. The solution features Echelon’s award winning software, which provides monitoring, application control and sensing for low voltage grid and smart meters. It is expected to serve approximately 150,000 NRGi homes and business customers.

Cisco and Control4, two of the connected home heavy weights have entered into a strategic partnership around the creation of smart home energy management solutions.  Both companies already have their own platform; control4 has its EMS 100 Suite and Cisco has the Home Energy Controller (HEC).  Control4 recently announced that it was going through another round of funding, which could be the drive behind this partnership with Cisco.

NV Energy has partnered with Control4 to roll out Control4’s home energy management solutions. NV Energy will integrate Control4 Advantage software with its demand response management system, to allow NV Energy to communicate with and manage any number of home area networks on the Control4 EMS 100 platform. In an effort to create an appealing customer experience NV Energy has a target of rolling out up to 20,000 EMS 100 systems to customer homes by 2012.