The building equipment and services industries have always been highly fragmented. While leaders such as Honeywell and Johnson Controls have large, multinational presences, most of the market is divvied up among thousands of smaller companies with a relatively narrow regional or technological focus. Even CB Richard Ellis, the real estate firm with (more…)

Are we entering a new era of energy efficiency?

That’s what economists Ahmad Faruqui and Doug Mitarotonda of The Brattle Group have told Smart Grid News as a preview of their new white paper. They predict that electricity demand in the United States will fall between 5 to 15 per cent by 2020. (more…)

The U.S. stands at an energy crossroads. With or without new direction from policymakers, huge sums will be invested in the electricity system as aging infrastructure is replaced and new infrastructure is built to meet our country’s growing energy needs. In the 11 states that comprise the Western (more…)

Johnson Controls is a sustainability veteran. Back in 1885 it invented the first electric room thermostat. These days it operates in 150 countries and employs 142,000 people whose main job is to create products, services and solutions to optimize energy and operational efficiencies of buildings. (more…)

The microgrid market today is in flux. Most projects being implemented around the world feature teams with a variety of players – large and small – each contributing specific components and services to pilot projects, the majority of them still considered to be in the R&D phase.

The lack of operating experience of (more…)

Government funding has played a key role in launching the microgrid market, especially at the federal government level. Yet there is, at present, few “microgrid” line items in most federal, state or local government budgets. In the Obama Administration’s ARRA stimulus package, there are categories for “customer-owned systems” and even “microgrids,” but these were never (more…)

No one would disagree that this is a good time to be in the energy efficiency business. Another report, this one out last week, signals just how good.

Conducted by Comverge, the survey of more than 100 US utilities found that 92% plan to increase their efficiency budgets by at least 10% in 2011. Comverge also found (more…)

Pike Research recently published its free (!) white paper Smart Grid: 10 Trends to Watch in 2011 and Beyond and have received some interesting feedback. Since most of this has been expressed privately, I thought I would aggregate comments on each trend and share it here.

No. 1 – Security Will Become the Top Smart Grid Concern. There was universal (more…)

Market drivers in the home energy management (HEM) space are indicative of any residential energy efficiency market –they pivot on energy efficiency measures and applications affecting the bottom line. Additionally, in the residential energy efficiency space –and more specifically (more…)

Virtual power plants (VPPs) rely upon software systems to remotely and automatically dispatch and optimize generation or demand-side or storage resources in a single, secure web-connected system. In the U.S., VPPs not only deal with the supply side, but also help manage demand and ensure reliability of grid functions through demand response (more…)