Chinese officials have outlined plans to invest nearly $500 billion in electric power infrastructure — including roughly $90 billion in smart grid technologies — by 2020, a strategy experts say could significantly improve the nation’s energy efficiency and cement a dominant position in the smart grid market. (more…)

SmartSynch is a Jackson, Mississippi, provider of smart grid solutions and one of the few such companies which leverage existing cellular networks.

SmartSynch owns at least 14 patents and pending patent applications, including at least two patent families relating to wireless data transmission and (more…)

U.S. utilities are getting smarter, and smart grids are making the difference. This theme permeated the recent Autovation 2011 conference in suburban Washington, D.C., which provided an overview of trends and recent developments.

How smart? No one from the utilities admitted (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, I came back to my office from a seminar in Seoul. When I stood in front of the elevator door, the light in the hall went out, along with the elevator sign lamp. The elevator indicators quickly recovered in few seconds. I thought that the lobby lights would also shortly be turned on, but the (more…)

In the past, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has played a remarkably consistent role in commercializing new technologies that provide tremendous social benefits within the larger civilian realm. The Internet, created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969, is perhaps the best-known DOD (more…)

When it comes to understanding the environmental impact of our personal choices, the EPA’s model of rating car fuel efficiency is a good lead to follow. Greenhouse gas emissions are tied to how much fuel is burned, and we all know how much gas our car burns thanks to the omnipresent MPG ratings. Many (more…)

Glendale Water and Power, the municipal utility for the city of Glendale, California, is one of the first U.S utilities to connect all of its electric customers using smart grid technology and the first to integrate smart systems for two commodities: electricity and water. The company has more than 84,000 electric and (more…)

During Hurricane Irene I found myself outrunning the storm as I drove from Washington, DC to my home north of Boston after delivering my son to college. With more family in New Jersey and New York, including another son living in a NYC evacuation zone, I listened to the news throughout the 10-hour drive (more…)

In a previous post, I wrote about Texas smart meter company TransData‘s patent infringement suit against CoServ, a Texas utility.

TransData recently extended its patent enforcement activity from Texas in an easterly direction through the southeastern United States, filing complaints (more…)

Hurricane Irene, which knocked out power for approximately six million customers in 13 states and the District of Columbia last week, raises a question: What smart grid technology could have enabled homes, businesses, and mission critical institutions to have played a more vital role in providing reliability, security, and (more…)