PROJECT EASY GREEN

The Ecomagination challenge paid off for FMC-Tech.

The Irish company, which provides real-time monitoring of  power lines, will get bought by General Electric. FMC-Tech was one of the twelve winners of the Ecomagination challenge in 2010. Terms were not disclosed.

It marks yet another acquisition in the grid world. ABB and Schneider Electric have snapped up a number of companies since the end of 2010. GE, meanwhile, bought Lineage Power Holdings, which makes poiwer equipment, earlier this year. Voltage regulation will be one of the prime issues in grid management this year, according to, among others, Elster Solutions CEO Mark Munday.

Siemens, the fourth member of the four horsemen of the smart grid, has been noticeably quiet when it comes to acquisitions lately.

Elsewhere:

–Google claimed, but didn't, have a first today when it announced it would open a data center cooled by seawater in Finland. Google bought a paper mill in 2009 and retrofitted it to become a data center.

Actually, another group built a data center in downtown Helsinki cooled by sea water last year. The center, built by BaseN and Academica Oy, is located in a cave beneath Uspenski Cathedral that served as a bomb shelter during World War II. The entrance is a doorway carved into the rock base of the cathedral. Pipes dip seventy five meters into the sea and bring up chiilly water to cool the server racks. A megawatt of waste heat from the server room gets injected into the city's district heating system.

–More not-firsts. Cannacord Genuity trumpeted that is has learned that GE has selected Cree to supply GE with LEDs for its 60-watt equivalent LED bulbs. "GE is a big win for Cree," the investment bank stated.

Last year, General Electric chose Cree to supply LEDs for its LED bulbs. Last year, GE's bulb produced as much light as a 40-watt bulb. Putting in more LEDs and a few more tweaks makes it a 60-watt equivalent. GE thus is extending the contract.

–Quantum Dot has raised $22 million. The company wants to make full-color LEDs with quantum dots. (futuristic. don't ask.) A few companies have tinkered with quantum dots over the past several years because of the potential for efficiency and shrinking the size of light sources. It's promising.

–Finally, Harvest Power, which turns organic waste into fertilizer and renewable energy, expanded its Series B by $6 million. The second round now comes to $51.7 million. SAM Equity, a branch of Rabobank, is an investor. Recycling will be one of the big stories this year and beyond. We're up to our necks in trash, raw materials and commodities are rising in price and policies are encouraging reuse and recycling. California, for instance, imposed a tax for carpet recycling this year that consumers pay when they get new carpet.

Harvest produces power and natural gas from organic waste and then converts the solids left over into soil supplements.

Speaking of trash, a Who's Who of E-waste recyclers will speak in Palo Alto on the opportunities in the field on June 1 in Palo Alto. It's big business. John Shegerian, CEO of Electronic Recyclers, says his company takes in 15 million pounds of electronic waste a month. It has seven centers in the U.S. and will soon expand overseas. Creighton Bildstein of Associated Tele-Networking tells me his company accepts the equivalent of 35 semi trucks worth of old telco equipment a month. Associated then shares the proceeds from seling the raw materials with the original owners.

–Final note: here is a video with more on the seawater-cooled data center from BaseN:

Hitachi will be one of the primary participants in a project that could make Maui a smart grid showcase. The Japanese conglomerate, along with Sharp, Pacific Northwest National Labs and others, have announced plans to deploy various smart grid technologies — EV charging, voltage management, renewable integration — on the island. Study begins now and, ideally, the project will get implemented by 2015.

The deal is the latest step in the increasing focus that Japan Inc. is putting on the smart grid. Toshiba might buy Landis + Gyr. Panasonic wants to be number one in green electronics. Hitachi has a number of activities worldwide but in particular is a specialist in community area networks. Hitachi and Panasonic formed a partnership to explore neighborhood and home-area networking. Hitachi also participates in the Singapore-Tianjin Eco City Project, a planned community outside of Tianjin in China. While Japanese conglomerates don't have the same brand cachet in the home that they once did, they still excel in precision electronic engineering and design.

Elsewhere:

–LightFair, the big lighting confab, opened today. Osram Sylvania to celebrate announced a 100-watt equivalent LED that consumes 14 watts of power. It will put out 1,500 lumens of light. In layman's terms, that's a lot. Don't look straight at it. U.S. regulations will impose efficiency regulations on bulb makers that will directly impact the ability of many to sell 100 watt incandescents in 2012 and beyond. Some are stocking up ("You can have this light bulb when you pry it out of my cold dead hand') but other consumers seem to be intrigued about the future of LEDs. Some 60-watt equivalent bulbs will cost around $20 by the end of the year and save over $10 a year in power.

Osram also has 75-, 60-, and 45-watt equivalent LED bulbs coming this summer.

One of the more interesting trends at LightFair is that the economics and dynamics of the PC industry are in full bloom. This year, two of the main topics of discussion are integrating capabilities (like networking) into bulbs and using electronics to cut costs. Some of the big headlines involve Marvell and Google. Go figure.

–Hara, the company that makes software for monitoring energy consumption, raised another $25 million. Hara has a list of celebrity customers — Abu Dhabi, the City of Philadelphia — but this is a crowded enterprise software field. Expect consolidation. Hara at least has the advantage of being one of the early leaders.

VentureWire also reports that Ray Lane, the former Oracle exec turned Kleiner Perkins partner, will also become chairman of Hara. To become chairman, Lane will step down from four other boards, including that of the mysterious Enigma Software.

–Transphorm, the company that came out of stealth earlier this year with gallium nitride AC-DC converters, announced its EZ-GaN transistor today. It goes inside of inverters and other devices. Transphorm says it eliminates 95 percent of switching losses. Conventional silicon AC-DC converters are already 90-percent-plus efficient. Transphorm grabs that extra 9 percent. Sounds like a good product, but it's good to have all of the numbers in front of you.

Cree, meanwhile, is touting silicon carbide for more efficient power electronics.

–The U.S. Senate is still debating whether to get rid of $4 billion worth of tax subsides to the oil industry. Democrats want to get rid of it. Republicans say getting rid of the subsidy would be a tax hike. (Note, however, few Republicans would say getting rid of the ITC would be a tax hike, but anyway.) One of the more interesting editorials comes from the Salt Lake Tribune.

"President Obama and the Democrats in the Senate want to end those tax breaks. (Utah R. Senator Orrin) Hatch does not. On this matter, the Democrats are right, and Hatch is not only wrong, he is being downright dishonest if he keeps defending the tax breaks even as he decries the size of the national debt.

"With pre-tax profits — not revenues, profits — approaching $200 billion this year, the oil firms have little credibility when they claim that coughing up a little more to the IRS would matter a whit to their bottom line, their hiring and their efforts to find, ship, refine and market gasoline and other petroleum products."

Finally, let's all recall some of the quotable gems from former Governor Arnold:

"Nixon was always being attacked sexually. It was always said that … he had no sexual relations with his wife for 15 years and that was why he liked power. And Hitler had only one ball, and that was why he wanted to conquer the world." -in a 1977 interview with Time Out

"What is best in life: Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"

Intel and Ford Motor Company plan to retrofit select facilities to see if DC power can really curb their electricity consumption.

Intel will wrap the facility that houses the energy research group, part of Intel Labs, in Arizona in a DC microgrid, according to Brian Patterson, chairman of the Emerge Alliance, an organization dedicated to popularizing DC power. Ford, meanwhile, will retrofit a building that houses both manufacturing and offices to run on DC.

In both examples, DC power will be used to run computers, datacenters, lights and likely the heating and air conditioning systems. Ford may even go farther and add manufacturing equipment to the mix. The Ford facility will also include an energy storage system from Xtreme Power. (Xtreme has racked up a number of high-profile wins for its secretive battery/storage technology, so chalk up another one here.)

DC power didn't go away after Westinghouse won the Battle of Currents 100 years ago. It just went underground. Most electrical items — notebooks, batteries, ships, planes, electric motors — actually run on DC. Power gets distributed across the grid as AC, but then gets converted and reduced in voltage — often a number of times — before it actually gets consumed. Every conversion results in a loss.

DC power advocates argue that power losses can be reduced with things like DC microgrid. With a microgrid wrapped around a large datacenter, for instance, the number of power conversions can be reduced from five or more down to two. In a datacenter alone, reducing power consumption by 10 percent to 20 percent and reducing floor space by 25 percent to 40 percent.

Solar panels, wind turbines and other distributed power technologies also produce DC power natively. By delivering solar power straight to LED lights, building owners will consume less power. The added bonus: you can also eliminate components like inverters and AC-DC converters.

"The trend toward DC is probably stronger now than at any time in the history of electricity," he said.

Patterson added that some are trying to figure out ways to convert buildings to DC without having to replace the wires. (Last year in Japan, Panasonic told me about plans for "hybrid" wired houses.)

DC is also beginning to challenge AC in high-voltage, long-distance transmission. ABB, which has planted HVDC lines in Europe and China, will help plant one in the U.S. at the Tres Amigas Superstation. Last week ABB bought a controlling interest in Validus DC Systems.

Patterson, by the way, noted that a number of lighting companies — Acuity, Philips, Osram, etc. — are members of the Emerge Alliance and will speak this week on how LEDs and DC can cut down power consumption at LightFair.

General Electric, meanwhile, bought DC equipment maker Lineage Power Holdings a few months ago and is working on ways to develop products to run industrial equipment on native DC.

DC. It's not just for crazy people.

ABB, the European electrical equipment giant that seems to be in the news every day of the week, has won a $20 million contract to refurbish a high voltage DC line in Vermont.

The line will modernize the Highgate converter station and allow the U.S. to import power from Quebec. Over long distances, HVDC lines lose less power and are more efficient than AC transmission equipment. They also typically cost less to build. ABB helped pioneer the field 50 years ago and demand has begun to accelerate. China is building HVDC lines to bring wind power from western China to the coast, while HVDC will join three of the U.S. grids at the Tres Amigas Super Station (which has nothing to do the TBS SuperStation on your cable dial).

This is the 15th HVDC upgrade project ABB has signed since 1990. DC is also making a comeback in other ways. Facebook and SAP have built data centers that run on higher voltage DC. (Running the data centers on DC cuts down on the number of power conversions and thus reduces consumption.) The Emerge Alliance is showing how solar panels, which produce DC power, can run LED lights, which run on DC. General Electric wants to bring DC to large equipment, like machines at mines that otherwise would consume diesel fuel.

Go, DC.

Elsewhere:

–Rob Ferber, the CEO at battery startup ElectronVault (more on this interesting company soon), told us during a break at The Networked Grid that the Fukushima disaster and earthquake in Japan have cut into the ability of Japan to produce oxides for lithium-ion batteries. As a result, prices on batteries could rise. Similarly, we've heard that TV news outlets could face a Japan problem. The factories that make mini DV tapes were destroyed. Most TV stations haven't upgraded to flash memory yet, so this could force them to recycle tape or upgrade cameras.

–The USDA and DOE gave out $48 million in biofuel grants today. Some of the awards include $5.4 million for the University of Florida for optimizing sorghum and $7 million to Domtar Paper to come up with ways to convert paper waste into oil or sugar. Almost $7 million will go to the University of Kentucky for on-farm biochemical and biofuel production.

–Thanks to all for attending The Networked Grid this week. We had a number of interesting sessions. Cree and Gridco outlined the future of solid state transformers, while Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck revealed that that company will launch its first commercial-scale home networking projects later this year.

In the hallways, much of the chatter swirled around Landis + Gyr. Will they hold an IPO? Get acquired by GE? Landis + Gyr execs kept totally mum, but others downplayed the idea of a GE takeover, so who knows. Distribution automation is clearly top of mind for many. Utilities are still struggling with consumer relations. As a result, we might see a migration of telco execs or retail execs to help them build expertise in 'customer touch.' 

In deregulated power markets, low prices help, but experience has begun to show that power retailers have to do more. Loyalty rewards, better customer service, individualized email pitches: all of these will help retailers woo and keep customers.

Oh, and everybody seems to be in love with OPower. They are the Tesla Motors of the smart grid.

–Finally, Intel formally committed to bringing out chips built with transistors with three active sides. Factories will be upgraded this year and in 2012. The remarkable thing about this is that Intel unfurled the Tri-Gate transistor in 2002 and predicted back then that chips based around it would come out a few years after 2010. Nearly a decade has passed and Intel has kept on track. Not many companies can do that. It goes a long way to explain why the Big I steamrolls over its competition in manufacturing.

Tomorrow, the two-day Networked Grid Conference sponsored by Greentech Media kicks off in San Francisco and one of the buzzwords that should come out of it is solid state transformers.

A small but growing number of companies are working on technologies that could replace traditional transformers — large pieces of industrial equipment fashioned from groups of components for raising or lowering electrical voltage — with transformers that largely consist of semiconductors on circuit boards. This process could begin to pave the way for a number of improvements in the way that power gets delivered. Integrating and managing renewable power and electrical storage could become easier. Microgrids could be deployed much more rapidly.

Grid efficiency could conceivably be increased by up to 8 percent to 10 percent because of lower conversion and transmission losses.

Cree is an early leader in this space, and David Grider, the program manager for the silicon carbide group at the company, will be on hand to discuss the projects it has underway with DARPA and ARPA-E. But you will also hear from Namish Patel, CEO of emerging-from-stealth startup Gridco, as well as Gary Rackliffe of ABB. Power electronics, not the most glamorous field a few years ago, has emerged as the likely vehicle for delivering the magic of Moore's Law to grid operators and companies specializing in device and building efficiency. Hope to see you at the conference.

–Trilliant, which produces networking equipment and software for the grid, announced that Salim Khan, formerly the general manager of ABB's North American network management business, has joined as COO. Interestingly, Khan also oversaw ABB's investments in smart grid companies, including ABB's investment in Trilliant. Like Schneider Electric, ABB has been snapping up both established companies and startups at a furious pace.  Naturally, high-placed execs are migrating from the mother ship to emerging companies. (Plug number two: Both Trilliant and ABB will speak at the conference as well.)

–Fallbrook Technologies, which makes a wacky-looking variable transmission for bikes and machinery that cuts down power consumption, has pulled its IPO. It filed papers a little over a year ago for a $50 million IPO and has since then signed up development agreements with several companies.

It's not a good sign, but it's certainly not a fatal one, for one of the emerging trends in green: automotive components and licensing. Achates Power, EcoMotors, Fallbrook, Transonic Combustion, Nanostellar and others are all trying to license technology (or license technology and provide components via the Innovalight model) to car makers. Car makers notoriously don't take kindly to outside technology. The advent of electric cars and increased CAFE standards, however, are forcing them — startups hope — to turn over a new leaf. LG Chem and General Motors have licensed battery technology from Argonne National Labs, while Mission Motors has signed MOUs with Chinese manufacturers. We've got more on this topic coming up.

–Ron Kenedi, longtime solar veteran and noted modern artist (I kid you not) has become president of JinkoSolar U.S. Ron for years served as the human face of Sharp Solar. Then, in 2010, he was suddenly replaced by Eric Hafner. Kenedi also serves on the board of Westinghouse Solar and he's a living testament to the endurance of solar.

–Speaking of solar, Trina Solar signed a three-year R&D agreement with Australia National University that in part will focus on monocrystalline cells. Suntech founder Dr. Zhengrong Shi served as a professor there.

–The EPA kicked off its Battle of the Buildings today. Teams from 245 buildings will compete head-to-head to see who can save the most energy.