The Colorado Cleantech Industry Association hosted the first of a three part seminar series on the Smart Grid yesterday at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. I was in attendance, along with about 100 other interested people from the Colorado Front Range.
The seminar began with a presentation from Luke Clemente, General Manager of Smart Grid at GE Energy. It was a pretty standard presentation on the Smart Grid concept. One interesting part of this presentation was describing GE’s vision of a Zero Energy home, where an individual home owner can use residential photovoltaics, small wind, solar heating, etc. to become a net zero energy consumer. Of course using GE products… I do like the way GE is taking a consumer perspective on the Smart Grid, not just a utility perspective.
The seminar then shifted to a panel discussion, with the following members of the panel:
- Peter Edwards, Director, Fairfield and Woods, PC (Moderator)
- Dick DeBlasio, Laboratory Program Manager — Distributed Energy, NREL
- Tom Enwall, President & COO, Tendril Networks, Inc.
- Carl Lawrence, CEO, Eetrex Incorporated (formerly Hybrids Plus, Inc.)
- John LoPorto, President and CEO, Powertagging Technologies, Inc.
Among a lot of interesting discussion, a few thoughts occured to me…
Powertagging Technologies has some interesting technology where they can embed tags into the power output from the generators. These tags are maintained across transformers and transmission lines. What this does is allows the power consumption end to identify where the power comes from. This becomes an enabling technology for a lot of interesting applications, such as thered power pricing, PHEV tracking, etc.
Tendril Networks collects information from smart devices in the consumers home or office, aggregates the usage information, and provides this information back to the utility. This triggered thoughts about the role of aggregrators in the Smart Grid, not just for information, but perhaps even for power from distributed generation or PHEV. Is this a new business segment?
All of these companies are located in Colorado, and the CCIA has almost 100 members. It is good to see what appears to be a healthy ecosystem for clean technology business in Colorado.
There was no representation from the utilities on the panel. The utilities are going to be a major player in the adoption of the Smart Grid, so not having any of them here made the discussion somewhat lopsided.
The CCIA is going to put on two more seminars in this series. The next one is going to be on Smart Grid technologies, and the final one on the Smart Grid from a policy perspective. I plan on attending both of these.
