Green Tech

Sacramento County plans to install a smart grid.

(Credit: Sacramento Municipal Utility District)

Sacramento County's community-owned electric utility has signed a deal for Silver Spring Networks to provide a smart grid for roughly 600,000 homes and businesses.

Installation is to begin in July with an expected completion date tentatively set for March 2011.

So what will residents be getting?

The smart grid will include the installation of two-way electricity meters and home area networks that will provide real-time usage information, rate information, and the ability to control a building's energy usage. This will allow users to monitor their electricity consumption, enabling them to adjust some of their energy usage habits (if they want to) from peak to off-peak hours. They would also be able to communicate with the kind of "smart appliances" under development by companies like GE.

Perhaps more importantly, the meters and smart grid will give the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the sixth largest community-owned electric utility in the U.S., the ability to immediately monitor usage and determine usage trends across its entire service area.

The new system will reduce operating costs for SMUD and enable it to improve its reliability, while providing customers with more information about their energy usage, according to SMUD's 2008 annual report (PDF).

"The new technologies will allow customers to make energy choices based on cost, comfort and convenience. Imagine a future where your appliances, electronic devices and programmable thermostat communicate with your electric meter, or where you can call up your energy profile on a laptop or a cell phone from any location," said the report.

The new deal coincides with what many experts have been saying: smart grids may be the next green-tech bubble.

Sentilla's microcomputers for monitoring energy consumption are just larger than a dime.

(Credit: Sentilla)

Sentilla, a company that makes energy management technology for industrial and commercial facilities, announced Wednesday that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B funding from Onset Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures.

The energy-management tech company has patented technology that allows people to use microcomputers to remotely monitor the energy consumption of industrial machines, and allow those machines to exchange data with one another, to collaboratively direct energy supplies to facilities as needed.

The communication between the human monitor and the machines themselves is done through a series of small pervasive computers mounted either at the machine or in the vicinity that can communicate through wireless networks.

Each Sentilla Mini computer is essentially a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller with a TI/Chipcon CC2420 low-power wireless radio that runs on two AAA batteries, according to the company. The computer is roughly the size of a dime and is loaded with Sentilla Point, a Java-compliant software platform.

In corporate-speak this type of service is referred to as a "demand-side energy management solution."

But Sentilla's technology does not only manage industrial machines.

It can also be embedded in commercial spaces or office buildings to monitor things like whether employees turn off the lights in conference rooms when not in use.

The technology was tested for this type of purpose at the Moscone Center in San Francisco during the JavaOne 2008 conference.

About 200 of Sentilla's microcomputers were mounted throughout two convention halls covering about 700,000 square feet. The computers collected data on the number of people exiting and entering the rooms, electricity usage, lighting, humidity, and temperature, then relayed the information back to a main computer via a wireless network.

By analyzing the collected data, Sentilla was able to determine attendee movement and energy consumption behavior, and make recommendations on how temperature controls, lighting, and electricity might better be allocated in the spaces.

The data centers used by tech companies to run their Web sites and corporate networks are notorious energy hogs.

The information and communications technology sector currently accounts for about 6 percent of the nation's power consumption, up from about 2 percent to 3 percent in 2000, according to a report in February from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

In a report to Congress last August, the Environmental Protection Agency predicted that the amount of power used by U.S. data centers would more than double over the next five years, at a cost of $7.4 billion each year. The EPA also suggested that the nation could save up to $4 billion in energy costs, if it made its data centers more energy-efficient.

Those figures have led many tech giants, such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Dell, to get behind efforts to reduce power consumption in data centers. Now IBM is ramping up its business of selling power-saving technologies with new tools designed to track and cap data center energy consumption, including power for air conditioning to cool server computers, according to a report from Reuters. The products were announced at an IBM conference Wednesday in Los Angeles.

IBM is also expanding to 27 countries a program begun last year as part of its Big Green Innovations that lets companies earn and trade certificates awarded for verified energy savings, Reuters reported.

"Energy efficiency has become a critical business metric, like product reliability and customer satisfaction," William Zeitler, head of IBM's systems and technology group, told Reuters. "This is a critically important problem in the industry."

Certainly, Big Blue is landing a lot of the Big Green by helping other companies go green.

The initiative has generated nearly $200 million of technology services contract signings in the first quarter and about $300 million in the fourth, Reuters quoted Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge as saying during recent earnings presentations.

Austin, Texas, wants to replace the cobra with solid state lighting.

(Credit: LEDtronics)

The city, which has been experimenting with several green technologies and trying to encourage green companies to locate there, will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of replacing 250-watt high pressure sodium "Cobra-head" street lights with LED street lights, which consume far less energy. The city estimates it could save up to $500,000 a year in utility bills by inserting LEDs in 5,000 street lights alone.

Maintenance costs would also likely decline because LEDs last longer. Although LEDs cost more, advocates say that the total cost of ownership, particularly in public light figures, is lower.

The LED city program is being driven by--surprise, surprise--LED manufacturer Cree. The company has kicked off projects with Raleigh, N.C.; Toronto; and Ann Arbor, Mich. Raleigh, for instance, retrofitted a public parking garage with LEDs and now wants to expand to its other parking garages.

Last December, Austin inserted LED lighting into a parking garage. The city estimates that it will save $10,178 in utility and maintenance costs a year. Payback for the lights could come in 6.5 years, the city said. (In 2003, the city replaced 5,200 traffic signals and 3,700 pedestrian signals with LED fixtures.)

The public sector isn't the only one buying LED lights. AgiLight and LED Lighting Fixtures, which make LED fixtures, say they are seeing a growing business in replacing neon signs in Las Vegas and other cities with LED lookalikes. Restaurants and stores are also experimenting with LED fixtures.