smart grid

There is a place where technology giants - Intel, GE, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Cisco and Applied Materials - are pooling their brainpower to try out the best ideas for distributed solar electricity generation and "smart grid" technologies. Where an electric utility is opening up its power grid with 338,000 customers so these companies can experiment outside the lab, in the real world - and see what really will work.

I woke up last night to the sound of various electronic devices in my house resetting themselves — after yet another brief power outage. I don’t live on the fringes of civilization — downtown San Francisco is only a short drive away — but I’ve heard from a long-time resident that our local substation is especially finicky and we’ve been having a spat of nasty storms lately, which doesn’t help the situation. Sounds like the perfect opportunity for energy storage.

On January 8, I spoke at Applied Materials headquarters in Santa Clara, California to a packed room about the status of electrical energy storage. Energy storage is the limiting technology for renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and particularly for the next generation of hybrid electric vehicles, the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).

Contrary to Nostradamus and the movies “2012” and “The Road” …. (drumroll please) I am predicting that the world will NOT end anytime soon. While we live in an era of unprecedented environmental challenges, we are also innovating solutions faster than at any time in the history of the planet.

Being an optimist at heart, the Conference of Parties at Copenhagen (also known as “COP15”) will produce a political “framework” for a new climate change treaty.

San Francisco is working to convert the city’s entire transportation system to cleaner fuels and electricity, and to build an urban infrastructure for electric vehicles.