Silicon Valley played host this week for the Department of Energy’s “Apps for Energy” awards presentation. Five teams came away with $75,000 in prize money. Their winning software apps could turn into profitable businesses in a vacuum left by the hasty exits of Microsoft and Google.

Remember Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter? In 2009 they were those companies’ answers to the question, “Who will be the Microsoft and Google of the smart grid?”

A year later, both companies pulled out of the market for apps that analyze the data gathered from smart meters. One reason: It would be years before utilities made interval data available to customers in a standardized format.

Then something amazing happened. In the fall of 2011 the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States called for utilities to give customers access to their data. He described a big, green button on the utility’s web site that would facilitate the data download to customers’ PCs.

Stakeholders quickly hammered out a data standard, and by early 2012 a few big utilities had signed up to be the first with a functioning Green Button on their web sites. “As soon as the first Green Buttons were launched, the development community responded — and eight seconds later, there were apps available to use that data,” says Todd Park, who took over as United States CTO in March.

Leafully helps utility customers visualize their actions as a variety of units, such as the number of trees needed to offset the carbon emissions from a certain decision that uses more energy.

The Department of Energy announced an “Apps for Energy” contest with $100,000 in prizes for the best apps that put Green Button data to good use. Fifty-seven teams entered. On May 22, at the ConnectivityWeek smart grid conference in Silicon Valley, DOE Assistant Secretary Patricia Hoffman announced the winners.

Timothy Edgar and Nathan Jhaveri of Seattle won the top prize and $30,000 for their app, Leafully. I published a story about Leafully on my Seattle Post-Intelligencer Energy Blog with photos and screen shots.

Second prize went to Melon, which combines Green Button data with parcel information to simplify the process of obtaining an EPA Energy Star benchmark for commercial buildings.

Third prize: Zerofootprint’s VELObill, which makes it easier for utility customers to view their energy usage and create an energy saving action plan.

Two more prizes went to the best student apps. The Wotz app, submitted by a team from the University of California, Irvine, provides games based on the shape of energy consumption curves. The Budget it Yourself app is a collaborative project from a team of students at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. It helps users track their energy usage and set energy-savings goals.

There are as many revenue models as there are app ideas, although none of the winners specified how they might make money or whether they would pursue funding.

Bill Reichert, Garage Technology Ventures (left) and Todd Park, United States CTO, discuss the winning apps.

“One obvious path to monetization is to recommend ways to improve the energy efficiency of your home, which tends to lead to vendors, and that tends to lead to economics,” says Bill Reichert, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures. An app maker with hundreds of thousands of users and has proven a way to monetize them could attract venture capital, he says.

Another potential funding source is to bypass the venture community and tap utilities as strategic investors as well as customers. Seattle City Light was a Microsoft launch partner when Hohm debuted. Hohm suggested energy efficiency measures linked to incentives available through Seattle City Light, such as rebates on energy efficient washing machines and ductless heat pumps. In the same way, an app like Leafully or VELObill could act in lieu of expensive campaigns to encourage customers to participate in those incentives.

One more set of prizes remain to be awarded on June 6, 2012. Two “Popular Choice Awards” and a “Peak Energy Award” will be announced, with prizes ranging from $4,000 to $8,000. DOE will also pay for up to three members of each winning team to travel to Washington, DC, to attend a recognition event and demonstrate their app.

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The Smart Grid needs Silicon Valley and the traditional ‘cleantech’ now demands ‘cleanweb.’

Cleanweb is the software side of green energy required to interconnect traditional ‘cleantech’ devices. Without connectivity enabled by software apps, we can’t realize smart grids or smart buildings, and we cannot empower smart consumers.

Anto Budiardjo keynotes ConnectivityWeek. (Clasma Events photo)

This has become evident as traditional energy companies have realized the need for advanced software applications and begun gobbling up IT companies — sometimes referred to as “softgrid” companies — through mergers and acquisitions. This is a recent phenomenon over the past few years.

We’re also seeing more traditional emerging-market catalysts get involved. Just as government incentives helped stimulate the semiconductor industry, the White House and Department of Energy (DOE) are now stepping in with programs — including Green Button and the DOE’s Apps for Energy contest — to catalyze energy-application development.

The result: a ripe market for Energy 2.0, which has potential to provide abundant, clean, affordable energy — by delivering real-time automation and analytics across the grid, and it’s only possible with IT.

At ConnectivityWeek in Santa Clara, key stakeholder groups will address the issues and opportunities of the emerging Energy 2.0 market. These include four groups: market catalysts, such as U.S. CTO Todd Park, who will speak on Smart Grid Green Button; software developers, who will engage in a Green-Button-inspired Cleanweb Hackathon; energy suppliers like PG&E and early adopters of Green Button and demand response; and consumers in all key consumption verticals.

As information and communication technologies evolve and rising energy costs lead to customer-demanded control, Energy 2.0 is inevitable. My expectation is that ConnectivityWeek will help define this market.

Guest columnist

Anto Budiardjo has held executive-level marketing and product development positions with various building-controls companies. He has more than three decades of experience in energy, connectivity and IT, and is a recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s Building Technologies CEO of the Year award. He is a founder of Clasma Events Inc., which organizes key conferences and events for the emerging intersection of energy and IT.

Conference

ConnectivityWeek 2012
Santa Clara, CA
May 22-24, 2012
www.ConnectivityWeek.com.
Twitter hashtag #Connweek
Live tweets: @Cleantechevents

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Buyer education is a never-ending task for manufacturers of light fixtures. With advances in areas such as color and dimming, light-emitting diodes are evolving faster than the public’s knowledge about them. Misconceptions persist, even among architects and lighting designers. As LEDs overcome their technical limitations, the conversation turns to the up-front cost.

The relatively higher initial investment often can be recovered through lower energy consumption, because LEDs last many times longer than conventional lamps. Lighting control systems maintain optimum lighting levels and harvest daylight to further reduce energy costs. The payback is accelerated when owners spend less on changing lamps over the years.

Understanding all of the variables, and how to evaluate them together, is essential to making the right lighting choices. Initial cost and short-term energy savings are no longer sufficient in the age of very long-life lamps.

“LEDs are a different animal,” says Neil Egan, communications director for a lighting manufacturer in Atlanta, GA. “You have to shift the discussion from a simple payback calculation to more of a total operating cost calculation. Of course, you look at initial cost and energy savings. But LEDs can operate in an installation for so many years, you have to look at the time value of money and net present value. You have to also consider the impact LEDs will have on other systems, like HVAC.”

The web-based Visual Economic Tool from Acuity Brands calculates the total lifecycle cost of up to three lighting scenarios. (Acuity Brands graphic)

The complexity of those calculations is why Egan’s employer, Acuity Brands, is launching a new cost calculator for lighting. The Visual Economic Tool is an extension of the company’s Visual system for lighting design. The new calculator debuted at Lightfair International 2012 this week in Las Vegas, and will be available free of charge at the Acuity Brands web site at the end of May.

The web-based Visual Economic Tool calculates the total lifecycle cost of lighting alternatives. “It can compare various fixtures,” Egan explains. “So, for example, if you’re considering a fluorescent fixture, an LED fixture and an HID fixture, you could compare all three scenarios.”

As with most cost calculators, this one lets designers  forecast energy consumption. But it is capable of analyzing much more complex cost characteristics.

“The Visual Economic Tool goes beyond the payback aspect of lighting and looks at multiple facets of a lighting investment, including the long-term and short-term costs,” Egan says. Designers can calculate the relative costs of maintenance, lighting controls, heating and cooling. The result is a side-by-side graphical comparison of the selected scenarios. Egan says, “It’s as sophisticated as the amount of data you wish to put into it.”

The cost of lighting is somewhat new to the conversation when building or retrofitting a space, Egan recalls. There was a time when “lighting was always just a given. No one sat down and really calculated what that lighting was costing, until utility rates started to climb.” Then it became apparent that, as the Department of Energy estimates, Lighting consumes close to 35 percent of the electricity used in commercial buildings in the United States.

“Suddenly lighting became recognizable as a large chunk of the annual operating cost. Now we’re talking about new lighting technology and integrating controls,” Egan says. “In the not too distant future this level of calculations will become standard operating procedure.”

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What will it take for light-emitting diodes to achieve critical mass in the lighting marketplace? The biggest obstacles have been cost and cast. These futuristic nanofiber and nanoparticle technologies could overcome both.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are regarded by the lighting industry as the future of general illumination. LEDs have been around for years, but they still hold only about a seven percent share of the light source market.

LumiSands' LumiLux disc under UV irradiation. (LumiSands photo)

Replacing conventional lights with LEDs is a costly proposition that takes years to pay off. LEDs do pay off, eventually, because they save more energy and last many times longer than conventional lamps. But, as with many energy efficiency measures, buyers are hesitant to make bigger investments up front with the promise of saving that amount over the course of a decade or longer.

Despite higher energy efficiency and product longevity, buyers have been slow to switch to LED lighting solutions due to inferior color quality. The brightest, and therefore most efficient, LEDs emit a ghostly blue cast.

Thus far, the accepted method of overcoming that blue cast is to coat LEDs with yellow phosphor. The phosphor absorbs part of the blue light and emits yellow light to create a more natural white — but still not quite as white as incandescent sources.

Bringing the light color closer to natural white requires adding other phosphors to the coating. Those phosphors have another problem: They’re made with rare earth elements for which the market price is unpredictable. That word, “rare,” has something to do with it.

Toxicity is another cost factor. Environmental regulations could make life harder for companies using cadmium nanoparticles, for example, to solve the color problem.

High-priced ingredients could put the kibosh on some techniques to improve LED color quality by adding more exotic (and more expensive) phosphors into the mix.

LumiSands

Seattle-based LumiSands showed me a better idea. Their phosphors are nanoparticles made from silicon — and there’s nothing rare about sand.

LumiSands' nanoparticle solutions of various colors under UV irradiation. (LumiSands photo)

LumiSands co-founder Ji Hao Hoo says the semiconductor industry already derives silicon using well-established methods. “Because of the solar boom, the cost of silicon has dropped dramatically,” he says.

“We decide what color we want our nanoparticles to emit, and that determines what size to make them,” Hoo explains. “Then we mix the particles into a silicone polymer, similar to the material in soft contact lenses.”

When the gel is cured it forms a flexible, translucent silicone disc. (LumiSands could use a different polymer to make a rigid lens, but the readily available polymer for them to experiment with happens to be silicone.)

“What we do with that disc is to put it over a conventional white-light LED,” Hoo says. “The nanoparticles in our disc absorb some of the UV produced by the LED and reemit reds, and thus enhance the color composition of the light.”

Hoo estimates his discs will cost less than adding expensive phosphors to today’s white-light LEDs. “Ultimately we want to also present the option of substituting the use of rare-earth phosphors altogether.”

LumiSands recently competed in the University of Washington Environmental Innovation Challenge and got an honorable mention. “Competitions are a great way to meet collaborators and perhaps potential investors,” Hoo says, “but we’re not yet ready to approach investors or manufacturers.”

Hoo’s team needs more time and money to develop its technology before it can offer it to light fixture manufacturers. We might see his material in commercial products a year from now.

NLITe

The difference in the lantern on the right is the NLITe reflector. (RTI photo)

Another way to correct off-color light sources is to bounce their light off a reflective surface that shifts the spectrum. That’s the idea behind NLITe, a reflective material developed at the Research Triangle Institute in Research Triangle Park, N.C., with funding from the Department of Energy.

NLITe is a technical fabric based on polymer nanofibers. By controlling the composition and structure of these nanofibers while producing a technical fabric, RTI found that it can selectively alter the color of light from luminaires. It doesn’t matter whether LED or some other light source is used; the fabric is tuned to reflect a pleasing spectrum of light.

“Color shifting allows you to turn blue LEDs white, for example,” says Galen Hatfield, vice president of the Commercial Programs Division, Engineering & Technology at RTI. “You can take the light color as it’s coming out of the fixture and adjust it to be more pleasant.”

The material also has higher reflectivity, an even more appealing feature of NLITe, financially speaking at least. RTI says the fabric reflects 98 percent of incoming light. In contrast, traditional reflector materials such as aluminum and paint typically have reflectance values below 80 percent because they absorb some of the light.

Top: Conventional reflector. Bottom: NLITe reflector. (RTI graphic)

That improvement  in lumen output translates to savings in the long run. Luminaires deliver more light but use no more energy. Architects can specify fewer lights when the fixtures are more efficient. With fewer fixtures, owners save on relamping and maintenance costs.

RTI develops technologies, they don’t make products. The most likely path to market would be by licensing NLITe to a manufacturer of technical fabrics, who would sell material to light fixture makers.

For now, NLITe is at the prototype stage, Hatfield says. “We’ve done more than a dozen light fixtures and had them analyzed at third-party laboratories and luminaire companies. They validated that we have light efficiency gains as high as 39 percent.”

RTI in 2011 received an R&D 100 Award, given to the top 100 technologies. RTI does $750 million in R&D a year. DOE funds some of RTI’s research into technologies that save energy on lighting.

RTI hasn’t yet determined the eventual cost of NLITe, which could be on the market by 2013.

“The cost of using NLITe is clearly going to be more expensive than just lighting-grade white paint,” Hatfield says. “But when you fold in the value in terms of using fewer fixtures and lower total energy consumption, that’s where you really get the benefit.”

The author was a judge at the University of Washington Environmental Innovation Challenge.

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Cost parity with fossil fuels has long been the holy grail of the renewable energy industry. When shale exploration in the United States began producing abundant natural gas, prices began falling and didn’t pull the rip cord before hitting ten-year lows.

Michael Butler, CEO of Cascadia Capital

What impact is that having on the renewable energy sector’s ability to attract essential capital investment? I asked Cascadia Capital CEO Michael Butler for his outlook from an investment banker’s perspective. Our Q&A appears in Renewable Energy World magazine:

“In Climate of Cheap Gas, Forecast for Renewable Energy Finance is Cloudy: Q&A with Michael Butler, CEO of Cascadia Capital”

Brian Dumane, in next week’s issue of Fortune, has a similar Q&A with Daniel Yergin, author of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. Yergin’s outlook for renewables is a little more optimistic, but he downplays the importance of wind and solar in the energy mix. He says, globally, renewables will continue to grow apace this decade because utilities will diversify. “Gas has a new role as a partner of renewables.” He anticipates gas price increases.

“Will gas crowd out wind and solar?”

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Energy Priorities Magazine started on Earth Day 2004. Today is our eighth birthday!

Like any eight-year-old, we’re growing and changing. Energy Priorities moved its whole site to a new platform that’s more suitable for news media and more friendly for readers who use social media.

Our “Thought Leaders” energy professionals networking group on LinkedIn added its 3,000th member. By allowing the group to grow organically by referral we’ve attracted a high-quality membership. Join us there and connect with your peers worldwide.

There is a common theme within this magazine and my consulting work: Everything is connected. Anything I create, from radio interviews to marketing plans, reflects that principle.

Why? Because our sustainable energy future depends on it. Focusing on one energy source, technology or approach isn’t enough. The answer lies in how it all interconnects.

That includes the connection between you and me through Energy Priorities. Thanks for reading and listening.

Don’t keep us a secret. If you haven’t heard our radio specials on your local NPR station, please ask them about it. We would like to connect more people with the excellent information in those programs.

And take a moment now to share one of our stories with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Thanks,

Denis Du Bois
Founding Editor
Energy Priorities

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Opower and NRDC announced a new app that uses smart meter data to let residents compare their energy consumption to that of their friends on Facebook. Initially 16 utilities are participating.

“Social proof” is a potent weapon of influence that helps us to understand why laugh tracks are so effective, wrote Robert Cialdini in Influence, his 1984 seminal reference on the psychology of persuasion.

Social proof is also behind a new Facebook social energy app, announced today, created by Opower, an energy information software provider to the utility industry.

The social energy app for Facebook is also available on Opower's web site. It compares a home's energy use to that of other homes across the country. If your utility is participating, Opower can use your smart meter data.

The idea behind social proof is simple: Rather than to investigate energy efficiency best practices (or any other behavior) for ourselves in every detail, we use shortcuts to decide how to behave. One shortcut is to see what others around us are doing. Cialdini explains: “We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.” Monkey see, monkey do.

Cialdini (a psychology professor at my alma mater) serves as Chief Scientist for Opower. Utilities use behavioral science and analytics built into the Opower platform to provide targeted energy data and advice to each customer. Opower was founded in 2007 and works with 65 utilities to motivate their customers to become more energy efficient.

I quickly entered some typical household data into Opower's Facebook app — it's quite simple to do — and the app compared that graphically to statistics from other homes. The site also encourages users to share their home energy use on Facebook.

One result of Opower’s work is this new Facebook app, created with support from the Natural Resources Defense Council and used initially by 16 utilities covering 20 million residential customers. The app allows users to start benchmarking their home’s energy usage against similar homes, compare energy use with friends, enter energy-saving competitions, and share tips from Opower on how to become more energy efficient.

What does Facebook have to do with energy use? According to NRDC, improvements in energy efficiency have the potential to deliver more than $700 billion in cost savings in the U.S. alone. Motivating consumers to take action is one key to unlocking this potential, but it’s challenging. An interesting principle of social proof is that we are more motivated to follow the lead of people who are like us. Facebook taps into that principle and many others.

It’s no wonder that Opower would want the advice of a master of psychological influence to define, test, and optimize messaging to increase participation in residential energy conservation programs.

If your utility is one of the 16 participating, the app can pull energy usage data that comes directly from your smart meter. Small but vocal groups of utility customers have fought smart meters as being too Orwellian and expensive, so not all utilities have them yet. The good news is, you can use this new app without a smart meter. You don’t actually need a Facebook account, either. And you can still use it even if your utility is not participating.

If you use the social energy app through your Facebook account, you can choose to keep the app’s automatic Facebook posts to yourself, or not post them at all.

Related stories:

On Facebook, Some Friendly Energy Rivalry – New York Times

Facebook inks partnership with Opower, looks to socially compare home energy usage – Engadget

Facebook app promotes energy conservation with peer pressure – Venture Beat

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The Heartland Institute is distributing a handbook for deniers of global warming. Spoiler alert: The book’s message is to dismantle the EPA.

"Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World"

“Rooster” is a thinly veiled euphemism for Chicken Little. It comes from a story about a 19th-century tribe that self-destructs out of fear of colonization. To author Rael Jean Isaac, this primitive South African tribe represents modern-day believers in the threats of human-caused climate change, led by the “environmental movement” and “media elite” who are in league to drive up the costs of energy and siphon taxpayer subsidies into private hands.

The Xhosa tribe’s tale ironically fits the culture of climate change skeptics much better. The tribe killed all of its cattle and destroyed its food and crops, on the baseless advice of its witch doctors. Instead of taking action to prevent or mitigate the incursion of evil (British invaders), the tribe believed an irrational few, whose advice led to the demise of its people.

Roosters of the Apocalypse compiles the usual evidence against climate action, even those arguments that are outdated, into one handy guide. Confirmation bias — the tendency to look for evidence in support of existing beliefs, and to ignore or misinterpret evidence to the contrary — is the daily bread of those who defend a destructive but self-enriching status quo.

The author relies heavily on scandals such as Climategate and Solyndra that have long since been put into perspective. She tosses in the question of preindustrial warming, the mysterious failure of Antarctic ice to melt, Al Gore’s hypocrisy, the argument that carbon dioxide is benign, and the suggestion that global warming is actually good for us. Seek and ye shall find.

By way of proof, Isaac frequently cites third parties rather than original sources, primarily referencing a handful of other authors of denial books and blogs. So much of the book is literally self-referential that the footnotes are amusing reading in their own right. Isaac cites her own works and other Heartland Institute publications at least 40 times in the book’s 88 pages.

In chapter 7, “Confronting Global Warming Roosters,” I expected to find marching orders for deniers. But the author basically confesses that “tangling with the environmental lobby and its reflexive media allies” is hopeless at the moment. Instead she suggests reasons to dismantle the “overreaching” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because: “In short, the EPA is staking out its right to regulate everything we do on the ecological principle that ‘everything is connected to everything else.’”

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Hundreds of qualified climate scientists, the majority of them, publishing reams of peer-reviewed studies, have a point: The sky could actually be falling.

Author: Rael Jean Isaac has a Ph.D. in sociology from the City University of New York. Her M.A. is in English literature. This is her sixth book.

Publisher: The Heartland Institute is a nonprofit think tank that promotes climate change skepticism. Founded in 1984 by Chicago investor David H. Padden, the Heartland Institute seeks to influence policies that have national and international impact. It does not disclose its donors, but recently leaked documents imply ties to several companies. Some of the companies identified have since announced that they will halt their funding. Despite Heartland’s 501(c)(3) status, it claims to have more than 200 elected officials at its service and that it “contacts more elected officials, more often, than any other think tank in the United States.”

Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World by Rael Jean Isaac. February 24, 2012. Paperback. 113 pages. ISBN 1934791377.

Book reviews in Energy Priorities express the opinions of the reviewers.

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The U.S. Green Building Council today announced that the 12,000th commercial project has earned certification in the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The latest addition joins more than 137,000 LEED registered and certified projects, homes, communities and neighborhoods worldwide.

Square feet of LEED-certified commercial space (click to enlarge) Source: USGBC

“Twelve years after the first 12 projects earned LEED certification, the green building community has reached a significant milestone,” said Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair, USGBC. “The momentum for green buildings is rippling around the globe, enhancing the built environment for generations to come.”

Since its launch in 2000, the LEED green building program has offered increasingly sophisticated standards for how green buildings are designed, constructed, operated and maintained.

USGBC LEED Gold certified Anahuac Wildlife Preserve building (photo: Bernard Freeman, USFWS)

The 12,000th project is the LEED Gold Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. Paid for by the Recovery Act and rebuilt after the original facility was destroyed by Hurricane Ike in 2008, the facility will house new wildlife exhibits, an environmental education center, and National Parks employees.

Fedrizzi said the 12k milestone is even more relevant as the USGBC finalizes LEED 2012, the next iteration of continuous improvement of the LEED program. “With these next changes, LEED will continue in its role as a catalyst for transformation of the built environment to ever higher standards of sustainable practice. Even in these challenging times, it’s clear that green building is a movement whose time is now.”

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The smart grid might not have been the revolution many predicted, but it is happening — gradually.

“Before the New Energy Economy can take off, consumers must get on board. It’s coming — but the process will be a methodical and collaborative one,” writes energy columnist Ken Silverstein in EnergyBiz.

Utilities are deploying pieces of the smart grid in fits and starts, but some pioneers still feel the arrows in their backs. “We’ve seen the effects of the hype around the smart grid and early technology adopters who touted the consumer benefits of an intelligent grid … and, frankly, the promised benefits haven’t been realized,” LeRoy Nosbaum, chief executive of smart meter maker Itron, told Silverstein.

That’s not to say those benefits aren’t real, Nosbaum clarified. The smart grid just isn’t mature enough for most consumers to see them. Until homeowners and businesses feel more in control over energy use and see costs declining, they’ll will resist paying up front to invest in a smart grid.

What else has been holding up the smart grid revolution? Austerity measures are no help. Utilities face skeptical regulators and soft revenues. Stimulus funds have been responsible for $4.5 billion of the investments in smart grid projects across the United States since the recession began in 2007.

Despite the excitement about the smart grid, many energy consumers still have the same old grid.

Contests over technology standards are another factor giving conservative utilities pause.  You might think that, after a decade, this stuff would be worked out, but it isn’t. Communications protocols are a particularly heated battleground. How should smart meters send their data to the utility?

“Until yesterday, every major supplier favored a single communications technology,” wrote analyst Jesse Berst in Smart Grid News. All have their strengths and weaknesses; none is a clear winner. Utilities would rather hitch their chariots to the right horse, as they consider deploying millions of expensive meters with a long service life. So they wait.

Itron, for example, bet on a “mesh” of radio transceivers embedded in meters or on poles. SmartSynch, on the other hand, is a proponent of using cellular wireless networks. Mesh radio is reliable because of built-in redundancy, but a utility has to build their network. Cellular is already built, but many fear the carriers — who after 30 years still can’t deliver clear voice calls or mid-speed data everywhere — aren’t up to the mission-critical task of meter reading.

Yesterday Itron bought SmartSynch. Silver Spring Networks is said to be similarly moving toward cellular. Offering both protocols allows utilities to choose one vendor but mix and match technologies. With the acquisition, Itron “becomes the first vendor that can say to utility customers, ‘you can have it your way,’” Berst said.

Will the Burger King strategy get utilities off the dime and into the smart grid? That will ultimately depend on the people paying for it.

About eight out of ten consumers consider smart grid benefits to be important, writes Patty Durand, executive director of the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative. “Yet, not every benefit was important enough to justify adding $3-$4 on monthly electric bills.  When considering extra costs, far fewer (20%-30%) consumers rated that the benefits were important enough to help justify paying.”

In other words, until consumers understand smart grid benefits, they’ll go on asking, “Where’s the beef?”

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