smart-grid

One of the world's biggest photovoltaic projects is planned for southwest Florida. Florida Power & Light will spend $350 million to build a 75-megawatt photovoltaic solar plant at a planned city, Babcock Ranch, near Fort Myers, the company announced Thursday.

Construction could begin late this year, subject to state regulatory approvals.

Eric Silagy, the ultility's chief development officer, said at a press conference that the company's photovoltaic project is larger than any previously announced.

"We are extremely excited to be building one of the world's largest solar photovoltaic projects, once the state legislative and regulatory … Read more

Spies from other countries have hacked into the United States' electricity grid, leaving traces of their activity and raising concerns over the security of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks.

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a report saying that spies sought ways to navigate and control the power grid as well as the water and sewage infrastructure. It's part of a rising number of intrusions, the article said, quoting former and current national security officials.

The intruders don't appear to have done any damage to date but did leave behind software that could disrupt the … Read more

Updated on April 3 at 11:55 am PDT with corrected company name spelling.

IBM is working on two projects that rely on data-gathering sensors to improve energy efficiency.

On Thursday, IBM and Japanese company Omron announced they have developed a system to attach Omron's sensors onto shipping equipment in Japan.

As part of its "smarter planet" initiative, IBM has developed software to calculate the best routes to reduce costs and carbon emissions using travel information from the sensors. IBM says that the manufacturing and transportation industries account for half of all energy use.

In a separate … Read more

Deployments of smart grids should be slowed until security vulnerabilities are addressed, according to some cybersecurity experts, citing tests showing that a hacker can cause a major blackout after breaking into a smart-grid system.

The idea behind smart grids, a burgeoning energy sector in which even Google is playing a role, is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of an electrical system's power distribution. A washing machine in a household hooked up to a smart meter, for instance, could be set up to run only at lower-cost, off-peak … Read more

NEW YORK--Smart-grid upstart Silver Spring Networks closed a round of funding on March 1, which the company hopes will be its last before going public, according to Chief Executive Scott Lang.

Silver Spring Networks raised an additional 20 percent to the $75 million it secured last year, or another $15 million, Lang said during a presentation at the Jefferies Clean Technology Conference on Tuesday here.

After his talk, Lang said the company intends to go public through an initial public offering, although he did not say when.

"I hope (this round of financing) is the last one. We did … Read more

WASHINGTON--The Department of Energy will be pushing out $4.5 billion for smart-grid investments as part of the federal government's economic stimulus plan, but unless smart-grid standards are developed quickly, the government risks wasting its money on soon-obsolete technologies that could be incompatible with one another, regulators and industry representatives warned Congress Tuesday.

Integrating information technology into the nation's electric grids could enable consumers to monitor and reduce their electric usage and help electric companies locate and respond to power outages, among other benefits, said Fred Butler, a commissioner on the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

However, … Read more

IBM is joining a Danish project to optimize wind turbine energy for plug-in electric vehicles, the latest sign of the growing interest among policy-makers in smart-grid technologies.

The EDISON (Electric Vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated Market using Sustainable Energy and Open Networks) research consortium will seek to match power generation from wind turbines on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, with the power consumption of charging plug-in electric cars.

The long-term goal is to boost the percentage of plug-in electric cars to 10 percent in the country while maximizing the use of wind energy in Denmark, which already gets 20 … Read more

A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan--or so the saying goes, according to T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oilman turned clean-energy advocate.

To provide a plan to boost the nation's use of clean energy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Monday he will introduce major legislation this week to reform electric transmission line development. Reid made the announcement at a Washington conference where he, Pickens, former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, and others met to discuss guiding principles to reform the United States' energy policy. The forum was titled the "National Clean Energy Project: Building the New Economy."

The Obama administration has said it would like 25 percent of the nation's energy to come from renewable sources by 2025, and the billions of dollars provided in the recently signed stimulus package offer the means to get there, Reid said. His bill, he said, will provide more guidance for that funding to be used appropriately.

The deployment of renewable energy across the country has faced setbacks because of the challenges facing the construction of electric transmission lines, such as who will fund them and where to site the lines. The bill aims to give the federal government more authority over those questions.

It's a proposal that has been met with some resistance, Reid said at the conference, hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

"If this is going to succeed, we're going to have to accept that's how we've always done things," he said, citing the federal government's central role in developing railroads and a national highway system. "Everyone should get off the kick this program won't work if the government's involved in it."

The legislation will call for the president to designate renewable energy zones with significant clean-energy-generating potential. Once that occurs, the bill will call for massive planning efforts to site transmission lines around those zones--a process that the federal government will take over if it stalls. … Read more

WASHINGTON--Now that the federal government has authorized spending billions of dollars for transmission line construction and renewable-energy efforts, it may expand its authority over how interstate transmission lines are built.

President Obama on Tuesday signed the so-called stimulus bill into law, providing what Obama's climate czar Carol Browner called on Tuesday "an amazing down payment" on smart grid technology, renewable-energy production, and other efforts to create energy efficiency.

Questions remain, however, as to whether the Energy Department and other government agencies will be able to overcome a complex regulatory maze to spend the funds quickly and appropriately, … Read more