eMeter, which is led by Veritas CEO and former Oracle executive Gary Bloom, gathers information from two-way meters. The data then travels to utility companies and allows them to make better business decisions, to understand peaks in demand and to read meters automatically.

Consumers can also use the information to find ways to use less energy and lower their bills.

Collectively, the practice of gathering and disseminating energy usage information for greater efficiency and sustainability is known as the smart grid, and it’s been a focus at Siemens of late.

“The acquisition of eMeter will allow Siemens to expand its reach globally in the energy information and meter data management space,” said Jan Mrosik, CEO of the Smart Grid Division of the Siemens Infrastructure & Cities Sector, in a statement today.

While Siemens has its own energy division, eMeter’s staff and technology will be part of the company’s Smart Grid division within the Infrastructure & Cities Sector. (As an interesting footnote illustrating Siemens’ scope, this sector alone has 87,000 employees worldwide.)

eMeter has taken a total of $68.8 million over six rounds of institutional funding. JP Morgan advised eMeter in the acquisition.

NeighborOil is a startup that’s reexamining how communities buy oil for heating, and helping consumers negotiate for better prices and better service. Starting today, it’s bringing its revolutionary model to a wide range of residential utilities, including electricity and natural gas.

“Have you ever seen people who work their tail off and cannot make ends meet?” asked NeighborOil founder Paul Harkins in a recent interview. “On top of it, they are too proud to ask for help. We set out to create a way for people to pay for the things they must buy without having to ask for help. If you use oil to heat your home and you do not or cannot buy oil, you freeze. No one should ever have to look at their child who is cold because they do not have heat and feel like a failure. NeighborOil will eradicate that from this country.”

First, the company negotiates the lowest possible rate for oil in a given geographic area. The company then sells oil to local residents. Oil prices can vary based on region and the amount of oil needed. Additional oil offers may be applicable for a set quantity of oil in an area; once they’re sold out, the offer is over.

Residents can also track oil usage, payments and other data through a NeighborOil web-based dashboard. By using the website, buying oil and engaging with their neighbors, they can also earn on-site points, which lower that user’s oil price.

Here’s a video demonstrating how NeighborOil works:

Home heating oil (HHO) makes up around 25 percent of the yield of a barrel of crude oil. In other words, HHO represents the second largest part of crude oil usage, and it’s second only to gasoline. With HHO being used in residential and commercial areas all around the U.S., Canada and the UK, the market for HHO is vast. Harkins estimates that around 25 million Americans use oil to heat their homes. Altogether, the market for home heating oil comes to $32 billion.

“We have all sorts of people using our product,” said Harkins. “We have people who cannot afford oil to people who can buy but want to play the game of seeing how low they can get the price of oil.” He went on to mention a particular customer who joined NeighborOil in mid-July, bought her oil in late July and saved nearly 50 percent on her purchase with the points she had earned.

Another customer in Massachusetts had only $50 to spend and needed 20 gallons of oil. The woman already had no hot water. “We got her 150 gallons in three days,” said Harkin. “There are so many people using our product to finally have control of what they pay to heat their home.”

One unique factor with NeighborOil is that, unlike the competing 20,000 local distribution services, this startup allows consumers to pay online with a credit card. More traditional companies require cash or check on delivery.

In addition, NeighborOil will expand its service so consumers can use the site to pay for all their local service and utility bills, including natural gas, electricity and more. “Can you imagine getting your electric bill and calling the electric company and saying, ‘Tell you what, this $100 bill you sent me, how about I send you $50 and refer three friends, then we call it even?’” said Harkins. “That would never happen in the real world. But it is happening now with NeighborOil in the oil world, and it will spread to all services that must be paid for.”

Currently, the company is seeking more team members and is continuing to grow. NeighborOil is also looking for more partners that will allow members to earn points and redeem them for local services. At DEMO, the company is launching a retail platform that allows members to earn points for each dollar they spend with major retailers. Those points can then be used to buy oil on the site.

NeighborOil is bootstrapped to date and is currently raising its first institutional round of funding. Here’s our interview with the company’s CEO at DEMO:

NeighborOil is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of cafemama.

The company manufactures fuel cells that run on natural gas, which is broken down into a hydrogen-rich gas. The natural gas mixes with oxygen in the fuel cell, inducing a chemical reaction and generating electricity within the cell. The reaction also produces heat, which can be used in commercial heating applications — such as keeping a hotel hot during the winter or heating water for a home instead of requiring a separate water heating source.

The funding was led by Artis Capital Management.

ClearEdge Power’s funding is one of the largest investments in clean technology this year outside of electric vehicle manufacturers. The other largest investments this year have come in the form of a $60 million investment in efficient light-emitting diode (LED) manufacturer Bridgelux and trash-to-fuel company Enerkem’s $60 million investment. The funding is mainly geared toward marketing and expanding the company’s sales team, ClearEdge power vice president of marketing Mike Upp told VentureBeat.

“We’re still doing research and development, but we’re no longer a laboratory,” he said. “We’ve been shipping product for a while, so the funding is more on the marketing and sales side to expand beyond California to the East Coast, as well as Korea.”

The cells capture energy in the form of both electricity and heat, so they capture about 90 percent of the available energy from the reaction. The fuel cells plug into a typical power grid, but there are plans to make them independent of a power grid, the company said in its announcement. The fuel cell is about the size of a refrigerator, costs around $56,000 and generates 5 kilowatts of power and 5.8 kilowatts of energy in the form of heat — so it’s a little impractical for typical residential owners.

“We’re still interested in residential, high-end residential cells — a 5,000 square foot house or larger,” Upp said. “Those are our early customers, that’s a market focus for us, but the main focus is light commercial or institutional customers, like schools or businesses.”

The company recently secured a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that gave the company capital to install 10 fuel cells at businesses in Oregon. The funding came from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which will monitor the fuel cells to see if they are producing the kind of energy savings expected for the businesses that purchase them.

The company makes lithium-ion batteries that work in high-heat environments, such as on a laptop that generates a lot of heat when doing a lot of work. The Macbook Pro, for example, heats up quickly when doing video editing or playing video games. The company is also developing large-scale batteries that can hold a lot of power.

“We’re not a 1 megawatt player today, but we will be,” Leyden Energy CEO Aakar Patel told VentureBeat. “We will have similar customers to those that are buying batteries for Macbook Pros in the next two to four months.”

Batteries like those produced by Leyden Energy are useful because they can store electricity generated by non-conventional sources — such as wind turbines or solar panels — and release the electricity gradually. That helps alleviate strain on a power grid that might be overloaded if too many sources of energy feed electricity into the grid all at once. The batteries can also release additional electricity in peak-demand times, such as hot days or in the future when there are thousands of electric car chargers on the grid.

Rather than manufacture the batteries personally, the company has partnered with two original equipment manufacturers to build the batteries. That’s kept costs down for the company, ensuring each of its seven batteries available commercially are not being produced at a loss, Patel said.

“We started with the premise that we would partner, we had our manufacturing partner about a week after we started the company,” he said. “We might move to manufacturing internally, but the market is so positive at this point that joint ventures, partnerships and acquisitions, they happen very quickly.”

The company did not disclose the amount of money it raised in its first round of funding. It will spend the funding on acquiring new engineers and adding a third equipment manufacturer for the batteries, Patel said. Lightspeed Ventures, Sigma Partners and Walden Capital also participated in the round.

Enerkem converts household garbage and leftover debris from demolition and utility poles into chemicals that appear in household objects. That includes ethanol and acetates. The company raised $60 million last month.

“Enerkem’s one of the strictly fuel-focused companies getting funding because they are flexible on the upstream point of view,” Lux Research analyst Andrew Soare told VentureBeat. ”But there are still a couple of question marks related to their ability to switch from producing methanol to ethanol.”

When contacted by VentureBeat, representatives from Enerkem said they could not comment past the official announcement today. Soare said the company likely needed funding because Enerkem’s biofuel production facilities carry large upfront capital costs. It costs around $8 to produce the means to make 1 gallon of biofuels, he said.

Enerkem has secured a $130 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Energy for a plant in Pontotoc, Miss., that will generate around 10 million gallons of ethanol and other biofuels annually. The company is also constructing a plant in Edmonton, Canada, that will generate 10 million gallons of ethanol and other biofuels annually.

Valero, which participated in the most recent $60 million round, is one of the company’s largest strategic investors. That means the oil giant might either use Enerkem’s technology to produce ethanol or purchase petrochemicals from the company as part of an agreement with Enerkem.

The Montreal, Canada-based company raised $51.5 million in an earlier funding round led by Waste Management. The company has raised a total of around $166 million. It currently only operates one active plant that generates 1.3 million gallons of biofuel yearly in Quebec, Canada.

ClearEdge

The grant will give ClearEdge working capital to produce and install fuel cells in 10 new businesses in Oregon and California. The funding came from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which will monitor the fuel cells to see if they are producing the kind of energy savings expected for the businesses that purchase them. The fuel cells are connected to the Internet, which will let PNNL researchers monitor them in real-time.

The fuel cells run on natural gas, which is broken down into a hydrogen-rich gas in the fuel cell. The natural gas mixes with oxygen in the fuel cell, inducing a chemical reaction and generating electricity within the cell. The reaction also produces heat, which can be used in commercial heating applications — such as keeping a hotel hot during the winter or heating water for a home instead of requiring a separate water heating source.

The cells capture energy in the form of both electricity and heat, so they are around 90 percent efficient, according to ClearEdge. The fuel cells plug into on a typical power grid, but there are plans to make them independent of a power grid, the company said in its announcement. The fuel cell is about the size of a refrigerator, costs around $56,000 and generates 5 kilowatts of power and 5.8 kilowatts of energy in the form of heat — so it’s a little impractical for typical residential owners.

But the company said it is still focusing on residential markets as well as institutions and commercial applications. Fuel cells also have the potential to power electric cars and other forms of next-generation technology and help cut carbon emissions produced by typical power sources like coal- and fossil-fuel-burning power plants. ClearEdge’s fuel cells do not emit air pollutants and reduce carbon emissions by around 35 to 40 percent, according to the company.

The company says it can convert household garbage, leftover debris from demolition and utility poles into ethanol, acetates and other chemicals that appear in household objects. Valero’s investment in Enerkem appears to be a strategic investment, meaning the oil giant might either use Enerkem’s technology to produce ethanol or purchase petrochemicals from the company as part of an agreement with Enerkem.

Enerkem has also secured a $130 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Energy for a plant in Pontotoc, Miss., that will generate around 10 million gallons of ethanol and other biofuels annually. The company is also constructing a plant in Edmonton, Canada, that will generate 10 million gallons of ethanol and other biofuels annually. It currently only operates one active plant that generates 1.3 million gallons of biofuels yearly in Quebec, Canada.

Valero produces around 1.1 billion gallons of ethanol across 10 ethanol-producing plants and has invested in a 50-megawatt wind farm, according to the company. Existing investors Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and Cycle Capital also participated in the most recent funding round. The Montreal, Canada-based company raised $51.5 million in a previous funding round led by Waste Management, which also participated in the most recent funding round. The company has raised a total of around $136 million.

Don’t expect this to be a feature on your iPhone 5 (or 6, or 7). But the research shows that there may still be innovative ways to power all of our gadgets that we haven’t yet thought of.

Dr. Sang-Woo Kim, who’s leading the research at the institute of nanotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University, said that the technology is just one of many being explored to gather energy from environments. “The sound that always exists in our everyday life and environments has been overlooked as a source. This motivated us to realize power generation by turning sound energy from speech, music or noise into electrical power,” he told the Telegraph.

In addition to cellphones, there’s also great potential for the technology in noisy environments — Kim brings up the idea of creating sound insulating walls near highways that gather energy from passing traffic.

Here’s how it works: Strands of zinc oxide are sandwiched between two electrodes with a sound absorbing pad on top. The pad vibrates when its hit by sound waves, and the zinc oxide wires compress and release, which generates electrical current.

At the moment, Kim says a prototype of the technology can generate 50 millivolts of electricity from around 100 decibels of noise (about the same as a very loud motorcycle). That’s definitely not enough to power a cellphone yet, but Kim says that it can be used for low-power devices like self-powered sensors and small body implant devices.

Photo via Ed Yourdon

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

In a conversation with Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson today at the magazine’s third annual Business Conference, Gates said that one of the best aspects of nuclear power at the moment is its lack of innovation thus far, which leaves it ripe for disruption in the coming years.

When it comes to Japan’s current nuclear trouble, Gates pointed out that the Fukushima plant is an older second-generation reactor. Third-generation plants, as well as upcoming fourth-generation plants (which he’s also invested in), can easily avoid most of Fukushima’s problems — primarily because they have better ways of dealing with the afterheat that results after a nuclear plant shuts down. One third-gen design keeps a pool of water ready in the case of a plant shutdown, while fourth-gen designs have methods in place to avoid the afterheat problem completely.

Gates also points to software simulation, which helps new plants prepare for potential issues like the post-quake tsunami that shut down Fukushima. We need to use computer simulation because there is “no way humans can predict these things,” he said. Gates predicts that by 2030 we’ll have hundreds of new fourth-generation nuclear power plants on line.

But why stick with nuclear power in the first place? Gates pointed to nuclear’s “factor million” energy creation advantage over coal. And of course, nuclear doesn’t emit any CO2 waste either.

“We have to be safe, and be able to communicate that we are safe,” Gates said, referring to how we can change nuclear’s negative public image.

As for nuclear waste, Gates said that it’s a solvable problem, and it shouldn’t prevent us from deploying more nuclear reactors. He said that if the entire US was powered by nuclear, we’d still be able to safely store all of the waste. We should also consider how much of a problem a “miniscule storage area” of nuclear waste will be in the future if it’s clearly marked, and if we can easily move it in a thousand years, Gates said. He pointed to the nuclear plant designs favored by TerraPower, a company that Gates is also a major investor in, that create 1,000 times less waste than a typical nuclear plant.

As for other energy technologies, Gates said that we should be looking at all of them. He saw potential in solar technology, but only in large scale deployments. Gates called rooftop solar cells for homes “cute” — something that rich people can do, but that ultimately won’t solve our energy crisis. He also seemed completely unconvinced that hydrogen fuel will play any part in our future. Instead, we may be better off converting hydrogen into hydrocarbons that can be used in existing infrastructure.

Consumers have sued PG&E and Oncor over smart meters that they felt overcharged them (both suits were found to be without merit). Consumers in Illinois have claimed smart meters cause headaches and impotency. Recently, protesters in California’s West Marin County tried to block smart meter installers in an incident that resulted in two arrests. While there are plenty of industry watchers and executives who will say media reports of these snafus have blown the issue out of proportion, the incidents show there’s sometimes tension between consumers and utilities when it comes to the smart grid.

With all that in mind, it’s interesting to see that one pilot happening in the U.S. is coming at the game with a new approach: Focus on the making the consumer happy about the smart grid. In particular, it wants to demonstrate that the smart grid can improve the quality of consumers’ lives, much in the same way apps add value to the lives of iPhone and smart phone users.

Brewster McCracken, director of the Pecan Street Project in Austin, Tex., says its smart grid demonstration project is unlike any others in that is most concerned with the value to the customer, and not the utility. Part of the project’s goal will be to study how — and whether — the smart grid can provide value to the customer.

“The customer will have final say about whether the smart grid is a smart idea,” said McCracken in a recent statement. “The truth is that we – those working on and advocating for the smart grid – need to learn a lot more from customers than they need to learn from us. Before anyone starts prescribing solutions, we must develop a much better understanding of what customers value and how they’re using energy now.”

In smart grid rollouts so far, there’s “not much of  case made for what the value to customers will be,” McCracken told me when we met at the project’s offices in Austin recently. Of course, a smart grid-enabled home could save you money on your energy bill, but he doesn’t think there’s been enough of a value proposition made yet. A smart grid-enabled home isn’t as buzzy or hotly in demand as the latest iPad.

So Pecan Street wants to focus on “the great applications that people want,” McCracken said. What’s more, the applications aren’t likely to come from the utility, but third-party providers, he argues. (“Do you get your apps from Apple or Verizon?” he asks.) McCracken sees the energy industry as comparable to the telecom industry, noting that it has transformed from a highly regulated, conservative industry into a competitive market filled with innovative, cutting-edge approaches. And in the same way that cell phone service providers offer free or discounted phones for subscribers, McCracken thinks utilities could one day offer free or discounted smart grid devices to ratepayers.

Point is, there is no killer application yet for the smart grid, a refrain I heard over and over again at the Smart Energy Summit in January in Austin. It’s true. There is no energy efficiency equivalent of Evernote or Instagram, Angry Birds or Twitter, though developers and entrepreneurs are trying to create them. And comparing the smart grid to the smartphone market makes sense for what smart grid hopefuls are trying to do.

Control4, for example, last year offered a developer’s kit so that third parties could design Flash-based apps for its home energy display. Intel’s recently debuted home energy management dashboard (pictured, above) that is sleek and colorful, with iPad-like touchscreen traits. In addition to thermostat and energy efficiency offerings, the dashboard has non-energy applications like video memos, package tracking, home security, weather and traffic monitoring  tracking packages, home security, and yellow page searches.

Pecan Street’s  first 100-home phase of the project went live last month, with an installed cost per home of  $341. It’ll be interesting to see whether Pecan Street’s app-store approach yields creative apps for smart grid users.The project takes place in Austin’s Mueller community, is a recipient of the Department of Energy’s stimulus funding and has attracted partnerships and collaboration from local utility Austin Energy, GE Energy, Oracle, GridPoint, Cisco, Dell and IBM. It will eventually expand to include 1,000 homes.

Smart grid investment will total $200 billion worldwide by 2015, according to a forecast by Pike Research. This represents billion-dollar opportunities for startups and major companies in everything from home energy management to building controls to lighting systems to demand response. Companies like Siemens, GE, Schneider Electric, LG and Intel are expanding their business to include  offerings in home energy management and electric car charging. As the smart, tech-savvy home becomes an increasingly important part of energy and technology companies’ products, Pecan Street is right on one thing: Getting homeowners to like the smart grid will be key.

[Top image via Flickr/Kevin Saff]

Obama proposes $29.5 billion for DOE budget — The president pitched more clean energy projects for the 2012 budget, to be funded by cutting $3.6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies, an idea he proposed in his State of the Union address last month. The Department of Energy’s proposed budget would give it $29.5 billion for the fiscal year 2012, with $8 billion for clean energy research, Reuters reports.

BMW readies electric car pilot — The company will be releasing 1,000 ActiveE electrified BMW coupes (pictured) to drivers in the U.S., Europe and China. The cars are essentially in a field test phase, Autopia writes.

GE launches line of halogen lights — GE’s halogen lights are in the shape of the incandescent bulb, but are up to 22 percent more efficient, CNET writes. Two-backs of halogen bulbs will retail for between $4 and $7. LEDs, compact fluorescent light bulbs and haolgen lights are another alternative to incandescent bulbs, which are being phased out due to energy efficiency legislation. In fact, Ikea announced last month it would stop selling incandescent bulbs altogether.

Enernoc potentially snared in business troubles — The demand response company recently saw its Chief Operating Office step down for unnamed reasons, soon after grid operator and major Enernoc customer PJM made general complaints of market manipulation in the realm of demand response, Earth2Tech writes. Demand response is a increasingly popular program in which utilities pay financial incentives to customers who agree to cut energy use during peak times. Companies like Enernoc help implement such programs. Shares of Enernoc fell on the news, and the company released a statement this morning saying it was in compliance with PJM’s rules.

These are all possible scenarios in an insufficiently secured electricity grid, and in particular in the emerging smart grid.

Smart grid is a bionic upgrade to power generation and distribution that will let our energy network diagnose and heal itself, dynamically integrate renewable energy and local power sources and automatically lower electricity demand. The source of those new superpowers is information technology. But increasing automation and communications within the electricity grid potentially has a dark side; increased vulnerability to attack.

The Stuxnet worm, which attacked nuclear power plants in Iran, suddenly thrust a subject which was previously the domain of a small group of experts, the security and automated control of industrial systems, into the limelight. The systems used to control nuclear power plants are very similar to those which run the power grid. “The idea that industrial control systems of infrastructure can be penetrated in a clever way like that has really opened the eyes of the community and the general public.” says Jeff Meyers, a smart grid executive at Telvent.

While security experts always knew that an attack like Stuxnet was possible, the general view was “the threat is going to be an external one. It’s going to come from hackers”. In fact Stuxnet was delivered as part of a Siemens industrial control system, an internal threat rather than an external one.

Markus Braendle is the cyber security manager at ABB, a leading vendor to utilities. He asks “How do you put a price on what happens if we lose power in a small distribution grid? Anywhere from a couple of people being annoyed because they can’t watch TV to, if it’s a cold winter, people losing their lives.”

Security in the smart grid

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which audits government activities, recently released a report on smart grid cybersecurity which reveals significant problems. The report concluded that there are gaps in cybersecurity regulation and problems with jurisdiction and that even when regulation exists utilities are focused on regulatory compliance rather than comprehensive security. Utilities are governed by a complex set of national, state and municipal regulators who set compliance rules and can impose fines if they are not met. Many state regulators have not imposed any formal requirements on utilities, and even when there are requirements, they are usually limited to smart metering.

Currently NERC (North American Electric Reliability corporation) defines national standards on cybersecurity for utilities, but according to several of the experts I spoke to, the NERC CIP standards are not sufficient to ensure robust security in the smart grid. Making sure the standards are implemented correctly via testing and monitoring is also an area of concern.

The smart grid security problem

The smart grid presents unique security problems. When a power grid operator talks about security, he means reliability of electricity supply. Keeping the electricity flowing is the primary concern of every operator. In the IT world, security means cybersecurity.

Braendle explained that ”in the end what we are trying to secure is a physical process and not a piece of information.” Most security techniques like encryption or authentication were developed for environments like banking which manipulate pure data. They don’t take into consideration the delays required to open a valve or switch a feeder and conversely often cannot operate fast enough for grid applications like protection where the local grid must be isolated from a malfunction in less than two milliseconds.

Bob Lockhhart, who wrote Pike Research’s smart grid cybersecurity report, told me that something as simple, from the IT point of view, as “pinging” a device to see if it is running can sometimes bring down a legacy system. Adding monitoring can disrupt real-time processes on the grid. For a grid operator reliability of supply is all. Braendle points out that “we have systems which have an allowed down time of 5 minutes per year.”

The smart grid will be composed of an enormous number of devices of various types and vintages, from smart meters and solar inverters to electrical substation equipment and sensors on electricity lines. More devices means more entry points into the grid which can be used as points of attack. Many legacy devices in the grid have limited processing power, communicate using proprietary protocols over low-bandwidth connections and have no built-in security. Replacing older devices is often not an option for cost or reliability reasons. For this reason, building the smart grid has been compared to rebuilding a plane in flight.

What are the security threats?

Ask a group of smart grid experts to name the major threats to the smart grid and you will get as many answers as people. According to Lockhart, when it comes to smart meters, utilities want smart meters to last for 20 year but this timeline is too long for IT companies. So they are concentrating on making the meters upgradeable. Upgradeability creates vulnerabilities. The threats include rolling back the meter to avoid billing, using the meter as an entry point to the rest of the network or even denial of service attacks on meters.

Braendle asserts that customer privacy is a new problem for utilities. Data from smart meters can reveal all kinds of private information from the number of people in your household to when you are on holiday. Utilities have a legal obligation to keep this data private. “How do you protect the privacy of the customer so not everyone knows when you are taking a shower?” he asks.

John Cooper, author of GridNet’s cybersecurity whitepaper, agrees on meters being a possible entry point to the grid but also points to the distribution grid (the part which connects to homes and businesses) where decisions which were previously manual are being automated and made locally. Cooper also considers renewables, in particular small-scale, local generation of renewable energy known as Distributed energy resources (DER), as a brand new area which doesn’t fit the current paradigm. Utilities are used to generating power in large-scale, centralised power stations. Distributed solar or wind farms, local electricity storage and even electrical vehicles add thousands of devices on the edge of the grid. ”DER will require control” Cooper maintains “and we will have much less control over the physical access to those locations as opposed to substations (A substation transforms high to lower voltage and acts as a local centre to distribute electricity to homes and businesses)”.

Rolf Adam, Cisco‘s Director of utilities and smart grid in Europe, contends that physical security will be more important than cybersecurity in early smart grid deployments. “Doing physical damage to an infrastructure is much easier than damaging that infrastructure using cybersecurity” he says. The best firewall in the world won’t stop someone from driving a bus into a substation. Adams also highlights the need to apply security to people, e.g. who gets access to a substation, and processes. Cisco is using RFID tags for utility employees and materials to track them in the field. It is also advocating the use of video collaboration tools so that more inexperienced, maintenance staff, who may inadvertently cause damage by flicking the wrong switch in a substation, can get expert advice.

Meyers also mentioned physical security threats and small-scale power generation but added that there are threats everywhere that new communication and sensing technology is used.

The good news

The good news is that cybersecurity standards and techniques or smart grid are being developed. “In North America right now the awareness (of cybersecurity) is higher than anywhere else” asserts Braendle. One reason for this is the NERC CIP cybersecurity guidelines and the accompanying fines for non-compliance. Another is that all smart grid projects which receive stimulus money from the U.S. government must meet certain cybersecurity standards.

Meyers and Cooper agree that a lot of good work has been done on defining cybersecurity requirements, but there are still many open questions related to regulation, testing and compliance. Meyers explained that the diversity in the devices in the grid and their age could be an advantage as well as a difficulty since it makes it more difficult to acquire the knowledge to do harm. He also wonders if hackers will think it’s as “sexy” to take down a part of the distribution grid as, for example, a big bank.

Cooper says that the ultimate goal of cybersecurity is not to make the smart grid impregnable, but to make it more costly, and therefore less attractive, to attack. However, his final words are clear. ”The smart grid should not be built if it’s not built securely.”

Smart grid company GridPoint is nearing a public stock offering,

PG&E smart meters vindicated, but the utilities company is criticized for poor customer service. An audit of Pacific Gas & Electric released yesterday reported there were no technical flaws with its smart meters, devices designed to track electrical usage more closely than conventional meters and connect to networked infrastructure. The finding ended an investigation triggered by nearly 1,400 complaints from irate customers who said the new meters were causing them to be overcharged. Though the meters got a pass, the report dinged PG&E for shoddy service, pointing to confusing billing structures and poor consumer education on the new meters.

And in related news, earlier this week, Texas utility company Oncor celebrated the dismissal of a class-action lawsuit by smart meter customers who also claimed the meters misread their energy usage. In both cases, investigators said the meters were installed before a wave of extreme temperatures caused energy consumption to spike in homes.

Facebook to Greenpeace: Our data center will “get greener over time.” After Greenpeace asked Facebook to reconsider its new data center in Oregon because it would use coal-powered energy, Facebook spokesman  Barry Schnitt said the climate in Oregon would “minimize our overall carbon footprint” since there wouldn’t be a need to operate chillers and the like. He also noted that the utility company, Pacific Power, plans to increase their renewable energy usage, meaning Facebook will get greener as Oregon does. Greenpeace has yet to issue a response.

Biofuels driving “land grab” in Africa. Reuters reports that foreign firms have acquired at least 19,300 square miles of arable land in 11 countries to farm biofuels crops such as sugar cane and palm oil. Critics have said the biofuels crops could take away land from communities who need it to grow food –setting up potential conflicts– and also bemoan potential rainforest destruction.

Agribusiness companies Monsanto and Bunge announced today they will invest $3 million in to commercialize agricultural and energy innovations. Both companies are partnering with Nidus Investment Partners, which seeks collaboration for companies and entrepreneurs. This partnership, which a handful of other companies may join, aims to bring laboratory technology to the market faster — items of interest include biofuels, carbon capture and other alternative energies.“The partners have the right of first offer at market price for these technologies, but we anticipate many will move into start-up opportunities and into the market,” said Vicki Gonzales, managing partner of Nidus.

Former GE exec joins Coda as CFO. Earlier this week, Mark Jamieson joined the team at Coda, which is making an all-electric sedan set to compete with the likes of spent at GE Industrial Systems, where he rose to CFO. The company also announced yesterday its plans to roll out the sedan in eco-friendly Hawaii by 2011. the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt. Jamieson brings 35 years of experience to the table, with 30 of them spent at GE.

The blog’s goal is to provide a central location for people to hear from leaders working on different projects across the department. Chu and his cohorts have been very actively funneling millions of dollars into a wide range of technologies — from solar and wind to smart grid, geothermal, biofuels and more. But a lot of these projects are highly technical and their immediate benefit may not be obvious. The blog will play a role in clarifying where money is going and why, and how it could eventually alter the lives of average people.

“While the act of starting a blog is hardly novel, it is a first for us and part of our commitment to achieving the level of transparency, engagement and accessibility that you should expect from your government,” Chu writes in his first post.

Building on this goal, the Energy Department has also launched new presences on Facebook and Twitter (@energy). Already, it has been active on YouTube and Flickr, and Chu himself has been providing updates via his personal Facebook page. But today’s developments should extend its reach even further.

The Department has used Facebook and Twitter to field questions from the general public for David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs, and to provide updates from the Clean Energy Ministerial, a major meeting of energy leaders around the world to discuss renewables and other clean technologies.

Since launching early Tuesday morning, the Energy Blog has also reported on the Clean Energy Education and Empowerment “C-3E” Women’s Initiative designed to encourage more young women to study the science and engineering that could lead to future clean energy breakthroughs. The post was authored by Energy Undersecretary Kristina Johnson, who wrote from her own experience as a woman inspired to work in energy innovation.

The Department of Energy churns out press releases on its activities all the time. Today, for example, it announced $30 million more in funding to forge partnerships to make homes more energy efficient. The Blog may discuss the impacts of these news items, but will focus more on incremental developments, and on calling attention to programs, news, and projects that might interest people.

The fund, which began raising capital in 2005, appears to be running a permanent fund-raising campaign. It wants to raise a total of $250 million. Limited partners in the new fund include California Public Employees’ Retirement System, Dow Ventures, Kuwait Petroleum Co., Abu Dhabi-government affiliated investment vehicle Masdar Clean Tech Fund and holding company Acorn Factor Inc., according to the report.

Technology Review has the scoop:

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids–all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America’s quest for energy security.

The ZENN car (pictured atop) will be the first commercial application of the Texas-based EEStor’s new energy system.

Kleiner led a $3 million round of venture capital into the company. We wrote about it here. Morton Topfer, former vice chairman of Dell and mentor to Michael Dell, is on the board.