Tweet I attended the SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio last week. I gave the closing keynote (which I’ll write-up in another post). I was interested though by the fact that two themes recurred in all the opening keynotes. 1. All of the opening keynoters made mention of Social Media – this was a [...]
By Tom Raftery
– September 26, 2011
Tweet The UK has an interesting Smart Meter infrastructure model. Data from all the country’s Smart Meters will flow to a centralised data repository (called the DCC), from where, energy retailers will pull the data for billing purposes. The beauty of this system is that consumers dictate who has access to their data, and so [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 6, 2011
Tweet As I have mentioned here previously, Smart Meters are going to bring a flood of data to utility companies which will need to be properly managed and which can be a source of intelligence for the utility, if they mine it well. At the recent SAP Sapphire Now conference, UK Energy retailer Centrica showcased [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 9, 2011
Tweet Smart grids don’t come cheap. They are typically projects costing in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars (or Euro’s, or pounds or whatever your currency of choice). Just think, the most fundamental piece of the smart grid, the smart meter, alone costs in the order of $100. When you factor in the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 6, 2011
Tweet I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently. This was the fourth SAP for Utilities event I have attended and it was by far the best. This was the first time I was attending the event as a speaker, not just an analyst and that may well have coloured my opinion [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 27, 2011
Tweet 12036 NM Smart Grids for Europe En SAP recently presented a white paper entitled Smart Grids for Europe – Benefits, Challenges and Best Practices to EU commissioner Günter Oettinger. The paper makes the case that there are few (i.e. no) ICT transformations that are as promising as Smart Grids in meeting Europe’s urgent energy [...]
By Tom Raftery
– March 24, 2011
Tweet I had a nice catch-up call with Mike Holt the other day – Mike is Semitech Semiconductor’s VP Sales and Marketing and we had previously talked last August. Mike was bringing me up to speed on what has been going on with Semitech in the last five months. Semitech make semiconductor chips specially designed [...]
By Tom Raftery
– February 1, 2011
Tweet . Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week: This year’s annual Transmission & Distribution Europe and Smart Grids Europe conference will be held in Copenhagen from 12-14 April. More than 30 utilities, as well as utility experts, regulators and technology giants from all over Europe, as well as the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– January 27, 2011
Tweet We had big plans for HomeCamp in 2010, but facts seem to have got in the way. What with Chris joining CurrentCost, and my wife and I having a second child- we didn’t have as much time to apply to the event as it deserved, or the community for that matter. Which is why [...]
By admin
– December 7, 2010
Tweet And here are this week’s Green numbers… Smart grids could save Europe €52bn Smart grids could save the EU €52 billion annually, according to leading smart grid companies that have teamed up to promote European leadership in smart grids. The sizeable savings would arise from reducing losses in the electricity distribution network through automation [...]
By Tom Raftery
– November 19, 2010
Tweet A few bits of Green News crossed my Inbox in the last couple of days so I thought I’d compile them into a short post – The Vodafone Americas Foundation and mHealth Alliance announced the last call for entries for the annual competition to identify and support promising wireless-related technologies to address critical social [...]
By Tom Raftery
– November 18, 2010
Tweet Understanding how processes and systems act on one another is key to sustainable living. Sustainability means living without externalities – because everything we do, as individuals, organisations or companies has a cost and an environmental impact. There is a clear parallel with healthcare- which requires a deep understanding of how processes and systems act [...]
By admin
– November 11, 2010
Tweet Photo credit TerryJohnston I attended the Smart Grid Technology conference in London last week and there were a number of interesting themes which became apparent. The main theme to emerge was the question of how utilities could engage the residential customer. This is good news – the first step on the road to recovery [...]
By Tom Raftery
– October 31, 2010
Tweet I attended the SAP for Utilities conference earlier this week in Huntington Beach and I have to say I am impressed by the progress American utility companies are making towards being more customer centric! The event was titled Sustainability for the New Energy Era and there was a full track dedicated to Smart Grids [...]
By Tom Raftery
– September 24, 2010
Tweet I attended the first three days of IBM’s Start summit last week and I’m definitely going back this week for more. The venue (Lancaster House) is a sumptuous mansion in the centre of London whose opulence, defies description! The event kicked off with a day dedicated to discussing Smarter Cities. The speaker list included [...]
By Tom Raftery
– September 13, 2010
“So, by embedding privacy into the design of the smart grid you will be able to grow your smart grid in a way that attracts more consumers to it and that’s the win-win proposition of this.” Dr Ann Cavoukian in this Smart Grids Heavy Hitter interview
By Tom Raftery
– August 26, 2010
Tweet I was lucky enough recently to meet Jose Iglesias, the guy spearheading Symantec’s sustainability efforts. I wrote the interview up over on Monkchips, but much of the content belongs here too. I like Symantec’s clear focus on energy. While others are broadening their sustainability story, Symantec is doubling down on managing energy more effectively, [...]
By monkchips
– July 23, 2010
Tweet GE published a U.S. Consumer Impressions of the Smart Grid [pdf] survey* recently. I spoke to the general manager of Metering and Sensing Systems for GE’s Digital Energy business, Luke Clemente about the survey and he told me that the main points of the survey were: 96% of Americans who are familiar with the [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 22, 2010
Tweet Photo credit urbanfeel One of the key tenets of a Smart Grid is that you have real-time, two-way communications between the consumer and the utility company. To enable this a communications infrastructure needs to be rolled out. Before that can happen though, we need to examine the different communications protocols to find the most [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 19, 2010
Tweet Photo credit XcBiker And here are this week’s Green Numbers: Smart Grids GE announces $200M Smart Grid challange GE wants to spark a revolution in the way we create and distribute electricity, and seizing on a critical underfunding of grid investments by the U.S. government (a paltry $3.4 billion) the 2nd largest company in [...]
By Tom Raftery
– July 16, 2010
Tweet Photo credit Lee Jordan We had a really interesting Smart Grid related conversation with a company called Arqiva the other day. I hadn’t heard of Arqiva before but they are quite a significant player in communications infrastructure. They own or have exclusive marketing rights for 16,000 communication masts in UK – what they call [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 24, 2010
Tweet Photo credit Lee Jordan Jaymi Heimbuch contacted me recently to ask if I’d agree to be interviewed for a TreeHugger article she was planning to write on Smart Grids. “Love to”, I said. Jaymi sent on the questions, I replied and today she posted the interview on TreeHugger. Here are the questions and my [...]
By Tom Raftery
– June 15, 2010
Tweet Greenmonk spends most of its time researching smart grid approaches and deployments. I hired Tom Raftery largely because of his visionary take on the future of energy networks – Electricity 2.0. So you can imagine how happy I am that smart grid stimulus funds are being aggressively spent… on antivirus and encryption software. Yay [...]
By monkchips
– May 26, 2010
Tweet Photo credit Tom Raftery (Me!) Sunspec.org is an alliance of renewable industry companies whose aim is to define communication standards data monitoring for the solar power industry. Up until now there haven’t been any standards agreed around data communication in the solar power industry which added huge cost and complexity to the monitoring and [...]
By Tom Raftery
– May 6, 2010
Tweet Jon Wellinghoff is the Chairman of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – the FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. I recorded an interview with Jon a few weeks back. The resulting video was too good to reduce to a single piece, so [...]
By Tom Raftery
– April 29, 2010
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