If you’re one of the 6,000 developers attending Google I/O this week, you should know that sensors will be tracking your every step.

Not your individual steps, of course. That would just be spooky. But there will be sensors distributed throughout the conference (May 15-17) tracking anonymous crowd data such as noise level fluctuations, footsteps, temperature, humidity, air quality, and more. In all, Google will be collecting more than 4,000 continuous data streams, according to a post on Google’s Developer blog.

The data, along with the devices and code used for the project, will be made available for public consumption via an open source license after the conference.

During the event, several screens around the conference will display real-time visualizations of the data, showing things like how the crowd is flowing from place to place, which are the quietest places for a nap, and which developer Sandbox sessions are the busiest. I’m hoping the data will also tell us which sessions have the best and worst air quality.

Google’s cloud team is teaming up with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-powered environmental sensors to collect the data. These “motes” will be connected to one another via a ZigBee-based mesh network and managed by Etherios’s Device Cloud. Google’s Cloud Platform will collect and manage the data, while Google BigQuery will help analyze the data.

The O’Reilly connection is a timely one, as O’Reilly also puts on the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend, May 18-19. So if you’re a hardware-hacking, Android- and Arduino-loving maker type, you can take all the coding skills you learn at Google I/O and show them off at the Maker Faire just a couple days later.

Photo credit: Google

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apparently, we love Wi-Fi.

Total cumulative global Wi-Fi-enabled device shipments reached five billion in 2012, according to ABI Research. And the pace of innovation isn’t slowing, with new Wi-Fi protocols rolling out in 2013 and close to 20 billion WiFi-enabled devices predicted to be in the market by 2017.

Naturally, we’re familiar with Wi-Fi in our laptops and smartphones. But the next level of Wi-Fi penetration, the firm says, is likely to be in home automation and smart, connected cars, as manufacturers continue to connect formerly isolated devices, equipment, and other things.

What’s up next? More speed, according to ABI’s Peter Cooney:

“Wi-Fi continues to develop as a technology in many ways,” Cooney said, adding that “the 802.11n protocol is now well established and has pushed the envelope increasing data rates, expanding Wi-Fi into the less crowded 5GHz space.”

The newest Wi-Fi protocols will vastly improve wireless data transfer speeds, with 802.11ac bringing gigabit-Ethernet style speeds and 802.11ad blazing up to a theoretical maximum speed of seven gigabits per second. 802.11b, by contrast, can only manage 11 megabits per second.

Of course, it’s not just Wi-Fi that is connecting our stereos, lights, cars, and smartphones. It’s also the full spectrum of communication technologies such as Bluetooth, UWB, NFC, and Zigbee. In fact, despite the fact that Wi-Fi is pervasive and powerful, it may be one of the least popular wireless communication protocols, as ABI is also predicting that in 2013 all of these technologies (combined with Wi-Fi) will result in more than five billion shipments of wireless connectivity chips in 2013 alone.

Which means that our devices will be smart and connected, even if we’re frying each other with all those radio waves.

photo credit: Palagret via photopin cc

Most of those five billion chips won’t be in phones, as tablets, sensors, cameras, lightbulbs, refrigerators, and more increasingly get connected to the Internet.

I talked to Peter Cooney, a wireless analyst with ABI, just before the the research company’s London offices closed for the Christmas long weekend.

“While the base market is primarily things that we know like smartphones and tablets, the growth is for the internet of things … those devices are growing very quickly,” Cooney said.

Of course, a lot of chips are being made for and shipped in more standard devices, Cooney added: smartphones, tablets, laptops, and netbooks. Even old-school feature phones are incorporating Bluetooth in addition to the standard cellular connectivity radios.

And one technology that we’re not seeing much of this side of the Atlantic is poised for a breakout: NFC. In fact, it’s more than poised, according to Cooney.

“NFC has gone from two million devices in 2010 to 100 million in 2012,” he said. “Android is really driving that growth, but NFC is coming of age … and integration into smartphones is driving growth in other areas.”

In fact, many “other” areas — as in not phones, not tablets, not laptops — are also getting a lot of wireless innovation.

“Really, any kind of consumer device is getting wireless chips,” Cooney told me this morning.

That’s something we’ve seen a lot of this year: sensors and connected switches for windows and doors, lights, heating, and more. SmartThings wants to help you control the real world, as does ReelyActive. And while NFC has been the next great thing for some time, we’re seeing a ton of innovation in the home automation space using multiple wireless protocols.

One of the big trends ABI is seeing is integration — like what Apple did in the iPhone 5 by marrying the LTE and global 4G chips into one.

“They’re essentially integrating to reduce cost and size,” Cooley said. Broadcom, one of the leading suppliers in the “combo IC” (integrated chip) market, will continue to dominate, ABI said.

Even old-fashioned technologies are showing new tricks: Bluetooth smart is coming out, and faster Wi-fi (WiGig) is on the horizon. It all ads up to a lot of wireless devices.

“In 2013 cumulative shipments of Bluetooth-enabled devices will surpass 10 billion and Wi-Fi enabled devices will surpass 10 billion cumulative shipments in 2015,” Cooney said in a statement.

The internet of things, indeed.

photo credit: Gramophone Maryland via photopin cc, BrickArt!san via photopin cc

The first part of the system is a hub that forms the bridge between the Internet and home devices supporting low-power, wireless protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave. SmartThings adds a set of reference devices to that: a motion sensor, a contact sensor that can be attached to doors and windows, and a low-resolution cloud-controlled camera. You can also use standards-based devices from other manufacturers. Finally, there’s the SmartTag, a keyfob that indicates your presence and also acts as an environment sensor. All kinds of apps will run on top of the basic platform.

“We come at the Internet of Things from the perspective of a bunch of cloud software guys,” says Hagins. “Our tendency was to divorce the intelligence from the devices.” He argues that countering that tendency gives consumers more choice and makes life far easier for developers. “The Internet of things has been held hostage by firmware developers,” he continues. “That’s not a common skill set. A web developer should be able to jump into an IDE, write a smart app that integrates and works with these physical devices, and push a button to deploy.”

The idea of the “smart home” has been around since the 1950s but never became mainstream. The smartphone supplied one of the missing pieces. “We are now carrying the perfect console for the Internet of Things, the smartphone, and 50 percent of consumers in the US and in Europe have one.”

SmartThings polled Kickstarter supporters on what applications they wanted most. DIY home security came out at the top of the list. The definition of security here was broad. It was not just about protecting your home from external threats but also internal threats like a pipe bursting and ruining your wood floors.

Control of entryways was another requirement. “When I use this device as the console for so much of my life, it controls my finances, my communications, my social engagements, restaurant reservations, my music system, my TV. It’s controlling so much and yet I can’t control my front door? We haven’t reinvented the front door in 1,000 years,” Hagins explains.

The next most popular request was care of people and pets. Do you know when your kids get home? Can you tell if the dog’s gotten out of the yard? That your elderly mother has taken her medicine? 

SmartThings’ 6,000 Kickstarter backers will receive the hub and a set of devices in January. The business model hasn’t yet been decided. It may depend on the distribution channels the company chooses. Partners like retailers should be able to add their own value on top of the platform by creating custom application. The company also recently announced a $100,000 contest for software developers and device makers.

SmartThings was founded in 2012, is based in Washington DC, and has a staff of 25.

The Wi-Fi Alliance released a statement yesterday denouncing the white paper as “flawed” and “inaccurate.” Though their response isn’t exactly a surprise, their counterargument merit a look.

First, the Wi-Fi Alliance argues that GE’s test of power consumption used an older protocol of ZigBee (Smart Energy Profile 1.0) that lacks the security and IP communications required for smart grid use. The alliance also took issue with the study’s use of the 802.11b chip, which it says is based on decade-old Wi-Fi technology; it argues that Wi-Fi based on the newer 802.11n standard would have yielded better and more realistic results since it’s the one currently used in real-life smart grid rollouts. Finally, the statement pointed to what it said was a more comprehensive study by the Association of Home Appliances Manufacturers (AHAM) that ruled in Wi-Fi’s favor.

Update: The back-and-forth continues —  Zigbee’s spokeswoman emailed to say that the AHAM study didn’t only rule in Wi-Fi’s favor, but also singled out ZigBee as one of the top performers in its test. (HomePlug Green Phy was also in the top).

A spokeswoman for the ZigBee Alliance responded to Wi-Fi’s salvos with a statement pointing out the use of ZigBee in about 40 million smart meters to date, as well as the technology’s ability to “securely transfer data at very low power rates.” She added, “There are more than 100 — and growing — competitively priced ZigBee Certified products available today, all of which are made by different companies who performed their own due diligence before creating a product.”

It is a high-stakes fight for relevance in what will be a big and important pie. Pike Research estimates that the smart-grid services market will be worth $4.3 billion by 2015, and Zyprme estimated the smart grid market at $21 billion last year and forecast that it will double to nearly $43 billion by 2014. Although GE is just one customer in the smart grid market, it is a behemoth and leads as an aggressive player in smart appliances and an investor in cleantech ventures. The issue seems to mirror the protocol war in the smart grid, where cellular networks, proprietary networks and the WiMax standard continue to battle for adoption, with no hands-down clear winner yet evident.

It’s also not entirely clear who to believe in this battle. GE has already integrated ZigBee into many of its home appliances, Greentech Media notes.

The GE paper tested the two technologies via custom firmware and found that ZigBee consumed less power in a 24-hour period than Wi-Fi, with Wi-Fi having a larger baseline power consumption (chart from the paper is pictured, right). It also found that ZigBee’s simple processors were $11 cheaper than its Wi-Fi counterparts and argued that ZigBee’s mesh network topology was superior to Wi-Fi’s star network topology. The paper was authored by the folks at GE’s Appliances & Lighting division, and looked at ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for home area networking for smart appliances. Bluetooth was dismissed for its limited range and its star network configuration, which relies on devices connected to a central hub, as opposed to mesh networking, where each device can act as a node.

This was evidently the same hangup GE’s writers had for Wi-Fi. While the paper notes that both ZigBee and Wi-Fi “can meet data performance needs,” it argues that ZigBee’s mesh network topology is better for reliability and ability to communicate and that it also allows some devices to remain in sleep mode while other parts of the network are active.

Both sides have made their case. What do you think?

[Top image via Army.mil]

GE likes ZigBee best for smart appliances — GE released a white paper yesterday that declared ZigBee-based communications are best for home area networks. GE has already adopted the technology for its own smart appliances, Greentech Media notes. The paper also evaluated WiFi, Bluetooth and power line carrier-based communications.

Deepwater Wind proposes 1,000-megawatt wind farm — The ambitious project would cover 270 square miles and be located between Rhode Island and Long Island in New York, the New York Times reports. The farm would be connected to grids in New England and could allow for cheaper electricity to flow into the pricier New York markets.

First Solar to tap Indian market — The company announced yesterday a deal to ship 15 megawatts by March to the state of Gujarat, Earth2Tech reports. The Indian government has a national goal to install 20 gigawatts of solar by 2022 and also has plans to institute solar subsidies.

Texas building up wind energy – Texas regulators have budgeted $4.93 billion for wind transmission line projects in selected Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, awarding the bulk of projects to Dallas utility Oncor (about 850 miles’ worth), Greentech media writes. But regulators also blocked planned wind lines from crossing the Palo Duro Canyon, meaning that wind energy will cost more and have to travel further to get to ratepayers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In this article, we cover the major fields of super-grid opportunity and the companies, large and small, playing in them. It’s not an exhaustive list, but rather a guide to the companies we believe are currently best positioned to charge up the super grid.

Power generation

One of the biggest challenges for the super grid is integrating sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power. The current electricity grid is most efficient when the power is being consumed at the same time that it is generated and when supply and demand are steady. With renewables, supply peaks unevenly since energy is not generated at a constant rate or at all times of the day.

Many small local sources of energy like homeowners selling back energy to the grid may also become available. A connected collection of these sources is called a microgrid and can be managed like a virtual power station.

The market for software to integrate renewables and microgrids with existing power generation seems to be at an early stage. Gridpoint delivers a suite of smart grid applications that aggregate and manage distributed sources of load, generation and storage including integration of renewables and electric vehicles.  Homer Energy provides modelling software to analyze and optimize power grids that incorporate high penetrations of renewable energy sources. Balance Energy produces microgrid and renewable generation solutions which integrate and aggregate distributed generation and storage resources.

There is a glut of new companies making solar microinverters and the software to manage them. A microinverter improves the efficiency of a solar array by allowing individual panels to operate independently. Normally panels are connected in a series and are only as strong as their weakest link, i.e. a panel which is shaded or soiled. Contenders include Enphase, Abound, PVPowered and Satcon. Some vendors like Satcon also makes solar energy management solutions for solar power plants. Satcon’s system breaks a large solar array into small strings of well matched modules in order to optimize the performance of the entire array.

Power storage

Energy storage is expensive so utilities tend to keep power stations running on low output, a state known as “spinning reserve,” so they can be ramped up quickly to deal with peaks. This is not very efficient and not possible at all with renewables so several companies are tackling the storage problem.

BeaconPower specialises in flywheel energy storage which works by accelerating a flywheel to a very high speed and maintaining the energy in the system as rotational energy. The energy is converted back by slowing down the flywheel. Stored energy is brought online when demand peaks. A single flywheel can store 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Distribution and substation automation

While smart meters — networked, computerized energy meters which replace old analog devices — get all the attention, equipment and software to manage the distribution network itself could actually be a bigger business opportunity. The Cleantech Group’s smart-grid vendors report says that this market is worth $1.4 billion in 2010. GTM Research’s smart grid market forecast goes even further and pins the 2010 market value at $2 billion rising to $5.6 billion in 2015. In spite of this, only 7  percent of venture capital dollars invested in smart-grid startups have been in the distribution sector.

Power is transmitted along high-voltage power lines from power stations to local distribution substations. These substations then distribute to homes and businesses. Smart-grid applications for distribution focus on automating those substations to a great degree and monitoring, fault detection and optimization of the power lines distributing electricity. The Cleantech Group estimates that only 56 percent of the more than 100,000 US substations have any automation. Utilities also need new distribution management systems to process and manage all the new data being generated by the distribution network.

The dominant companies in this market are legacy grid vendors like ABB, GE and Schneider Electric. Suppliers like Telvent specialize in particular areas like substation automation. Communications giants such as Siemens and Motorola provide the communications. A few smaller companies have broken into the market. Ruggedcom makes communications equipment like routers and switches specifically adapted to harsh electrical environments like substations. According to the Cleantech Group’s report Ruggedcom owns 54 percent of the substation routers and switching market.

Another interesting distribution company is Powersense. Recently selected as one of CleanTech’s Group’s global clean tech 100 list, the Copenhagen-based company produces sensing technology for substations and medium voltage distribution grids. For high voltage transmission grids Gridsense sells overhead line recorders which can monitor the condition of the line.

Smart meters

Smart meters bring information technology to the edge of the grid, recording electricity consumption and communicating data back and forth to a local utility. The Cleantech Group estimates the advanced metering market at $1 billion in 2010 while GTM Research optimistically forecasts $2.5 billion.

Any smart-meter rollout involves not just the meter manufacturers but also communications companies, meter data management systems and system integration. The diagram above from Itron shows where all that stimulus money is going and how it is divided between the different suppliers. 50 percent of all VC dollars going into the smart grid were invested in metering, in particular communications companies.

Communications are needed between the meters, local smart appliances and a concentrator which links the home network (HAN) to a local or wide area network to return the data to the utility. The HAN network in the US is dominated by a low power wireless technology called Zigbee. This isn’t true, worldwide, however. China, which plans to deploy 150 million meters by 2015, uses a powerline communications technology as does most of Europe.

The meter world is dominated by a small number of global companies such as Itron, Landis & Gyr, Elster and GE. Itron alone accounts for 50 percent of the smart meters installed in the US. They in turn buy components from smartgrid chip vendors like Accent and Teridian.

The communications software and chips are supplied by people like Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant and Smartsynch. Silver Spring networks in particular has  received a massive amount of VC investment ($247 million) and commands significant market share. On the powerline side there are companies like Ambient who create high-speed data communications networks over  medium and low voltage distribution lines.

Finally, utilities need new metering data management systems  to clean up and process the massive amount of data generated by the meters. There are a few pure play vendors in that area like Ecologic and eMeter but the giants like Itron also supply their own systems.

The smart meter can form one pillar of a home energy system such as Google Power Meter, Microsoft Hohm or Opower. Comprehensive home energy systems like those supplied by Tendril add smart sensors, appliances and plugs to the mix but are expensive and currently at an early stage in terms of deployment.

Demand response

Some commentators maintain that demand response (DR) is the killer super-grid application. Demand response means reducing the demand on the grid when it exceeds supply (see our coverage). By 2019, DR could be capable of reducing peak usage by 20 percent.

The Cleantech Group’s smart grid vendors report puts the demand-response market at $1 billion in 2010. Traditionally this is a services market where a few major players like EnerNoc (which alone owns 25 percent of the market) and Comverge enforced DR contracts with large commercial and industrial power users.Now these vendors are also moving into residential DR. Comverge is currently the leader in that area.

There are many different ways to implement demand response. Utilities can directly shut down devices. Customers can trade load reductions with utilities as a sort of commodity on an energy marketplace. It may be cheaper for a utility to “buy” large reductions from customers rather than increase power generation or storage. DR policies can be automated and linked to real-time pricing so that, for example, certain devices are shut down or slowed down when the price exceeds a certain level.

Tendril and Gridpoint provide DR systems linked to pricing.  The increase in automation and complexity of DR systems is also creating the need for a new type of DR management system such as those supplied by EnerNOC and Echelon.

Electric vehicles

Most smart-grid applications upgrade or optimize existing grid elements and processes. Electric vehicles (EVs), however, are a completely new addition — a major reason why we need to move from the smart grid to the super grid.

Take, for example, the Nissan Leaf, which has a 24-kilowatt-hour battery pack. The average American household’s daily consumption of electricity is 30 kWh. Electric vehicles will probably also “cluster,” meaning people in certain geographies will buy them — as early adopters set trends for their neighbors. Those close concentrations of EVs will place a major strain on the local grid.

It’s not all bad news. Managed correctly, EVs could bolster the grid rather than just strain it. Their batteries could be used by the utility companies as a cheap alternative to other forms of electricity storage. Researchers estimate that each car could potentially provide up to $4,000 worth of storage capacity per year.

Large volumes of EVs require battery monitoring software and charging point systems as well as increasing the need for many of the previously discussed technologies like demand response. One of the leaders in this space is Better Place which plans to not only supply car batteries and charging points but also all the software to manage them. Another big player is Coulomb Technologies whose ChargePoint networked charging stations provide myriad applications from tracking charging point usage to billing and fleet management. In both of these cases, the companies create software for usage with their own products. Gridpoint supplies more general-purpose smart charging solutions to utilities.

That’s a brief introduction to just some of the companies building the super grid, which will look far more like the Internet than the energy-distribution network of today: distributed, adaptable, and ever-changing.

Are you a green executive or entrepreneur? If so, sign up now for GreenBeat 2010 — the year’s seminal conference on the smart grid — November 3-4 at Stanford University. World leaders in smart grid initiatives will debate how the new “Super Grid” is creating huge opportunities in cars, energy storage, and renewables. GreenBeat 2010 is hosted by VentureBeat and SSE Labs of Stanford University. Go here for full conference details and to apply for the 2010 Innovation Competition.

Major appliance makers are rushing to release new, smart products — from dishwashers to refrigerators to clothing dryers — that can tap into home networks. There is more consumer interest in tracking energy consumption, conservation, slashing energy bills, and automating household processes than ever before, and these companies want a piece of the pie. Now GainSpan’s new products are making this easy for even inexperienced manufacturers.

Essentially, any appliance containing the GainSpan chip could be remotely operated by users from their internet browsers or mobile phones. The product comes with standard Wi-Fi security, so all homeowners would have to do for full control is enter a simple password.

This sounds all well and good, but market adoption won’t be a cakewalk for GainSpan. It’s facing some tough competition in the field, not just from another company, but from a whole different protocol: ZigBee, a standard that uses radio sensors embedded in appliances.

When it comes to the connected home, there are two opposing camps. Proponents of ZigBee believe smart meters should be the entry point into home area networks. There are a lot of powerful interests already on board with ZigBee, including major utilities, big meter makers like Itron and Landis+Gyr, and smart grid companies like Silver Spring Systems, Trilliant Networks and Comverge.

Champions of Wi-Fi admit that it hasn’t gained as much traction when it comes to smart grid applications, but it’s already so ubiquitous in homes and commercial spaces that it would be silly not to use it for appliance and home networking.

In the end, a blend of ZigBee and Wi-Fi will probably be achieved, as Greentech Media also points out. The two protocols even joined forces in March to promote the installation of both Wi-Fi and ZigBee radios in appliances — a move designed to force other, smaller protocols out of business. But for a while yet there will still be a battle for market share.

Based in Los Gatos, Calif., GainSpan has raised more than $33 million from Sigma partners, OVP Venture Partners, New Venture Partners, Intel Capital, CampVentures and In-Q-Tel.