We need network neutrality for the electrical grid in order for smart meters to take off

[As many of you know I have long complained about the current generation of smart meters. They are too focused on the needs of the utility in terms of minimizing peak load, and have little benefit to the consumer or the environment. In most electrical systems the utility owns and controls the meter. This reminds me of the days when the telephone company owned the telephone which inhibited innovation. It wasn't until regulators forced the telcos to allow direct interconnection of devices that computer and networking revolution took off. I think we face the same challenge with Smart meters. In Germany companies can arrange to interconnect their own government approved meter directly. And as you can see from this article it is already creating innovation. Some excerpts -- BSA]

http://earth2tech.com/2009/10/05/what-cisco-can-learn-from-a-yello-strom-smart-grid-pilot/

What Cisco Can Learn From A Yello Strom Smart Grid Pilot

Networking giant Cisco could learn a whole lot from its partnership with German utility Yello Strom, which I once called the coolest utility in the world, and which focuses heavily on smart grid consumer hardware and the use of the Internet for the power grid. While Cisco included Yello Strom as a partner in its smart grid announcement last month, the networking company announced more details about a 70-home pilot project using Yello Strom’s sophisticated “Sparzähler” or smart meter this morning. If Cisco aims to some day develop a Linksys-based home energy management product, the project detailed today could provide some important information for that effort.
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Yello Strom is also one of the only utilities I’ve heard of that has developed and sells its own sophisticated smart meters. In July Martin Vesper, Yello Strom’s executive director, told us that the company looked at the smart meters that were already available on the market, and found only tools that focused on helping energy efficiency from a utility perspective. Not seeing anything they liked, or anything that would get consumers excited, they developed their own, which looks like it would be at home in the window of an Apple store, is built off of Microsoft Windows CE, and has both a small web server and client inside. Yello’s meter is a lot more sophisticated than other smart meters.

This unusual environment — a sophisticated, innovative smart meter, and potentially a home broadband connection — will be a very interesting environment within which Cisco can run a pilot program. It could enable Cisco to get an interesting perspective for how it could roll out any type of Linksys, broadband-based, home energy management product, which Cisco has actively been looking into




Are Returns from Smart Grid Investments Too Weak for VCs?
http://earth2tech.com/2009/09/29/are-returns-for-smart-grid-investments-too-weak-for-vcs/

The smart grid might be the Megan Fox of cleantech right now (hot), but will venture-backed smart grid startups be able to deliver the type of returns that VCs commonly like (somewhere around 10 times their investment)? Not really, suggested venture capitalist Vinod Khosla at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito, Calif., earlier this month (watch the video clip here). During a panel on the first morning of the event Khosla called smart grid investments from a VC perspective “interesting, but marginal,” at “10 to 15 percent.”

Indeed, Khosla hasn’t made any direct investments in bringing information technology to the power grid over the years, despite the fact that he played a fundamental role in the development of information technology — as co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an investor with Kleiner Perkins funding broadband firms like Juniper.



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bill.st.arnaud@gmail.com
blog: http://green-broadband.blogspot.com