The best part of a system like this is not charging control from an operations center - but the facility to buy/accept power from customer sites. This facilitates local grids with net metering where Residential Power Units feed excess power to the grid. Likewise if you have a EV, and choose to - V2G feeds the grid.

There's not enough detail yet on how this software would do in growing local area grids - but customer generated energy from vehicle or an RPU needs handling. What is not necessary is the idea of operations center control of individual house functions. That intelligence remains the domain of the customer/home owner.

The need to control thermostats and HVAC and vehicle charge rates relies upon one central mechanism - single point energy. Which is the old grid. Distributed power generation by APUs and V2G obviates old grid centralization. When each household or multiple dwelling makes its own power, there are far fewer peak, leveling, following, etc. issues to contend with.

If this company focuses on data services for distributed power and local grids - they will do well.

Two Way Charging and Solar Roof Panels on Plug-Ins

The birth of the first solar panel on a mainstream production vehicle will be the next generation Toyota Prius due out next Spring. Nissan, VW and several other carmakers will offer solar panels on their electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles also. One solar roof panel will only provide a small percentage of the power that todays electric vehicles require. At 20% efficiency (Suniva and Day4 Energy), a solar roof panel could generate up to 270 watts. The panel will be optional and cost under $900. Keep in mind, the cost of solar panels will gradually come down, and the efficiency will gradually go up. Already, there are cheaper and more efficient solar panels being announced. The SunFlake panel, invented by Martin Aagesen who is a PhD from the Nano-Science Center and the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen, gets 30% efficiency and will be cheaper than current panels. Innovalight claims they have a solar panel that is 44% efficient at one tenth the cost. At the rate that solar technology is advancing, solar roof panels on vehicles will soon be over 500 watts. The next technology, coming 5 to 10 years from now, is infrared solar and solar paint, that will collect radiant heat from the entire vehicle body, 24 hours a day. This too has the potential to double the wattage again, but from twice the surface area. So we will be up to 2000 watts under ideal conditions (less depending on the angle of the sun and weather conditions).

Recently, Toyota described the 1/X Concept vehicle, a plug-in hybrid about the size of a Prius, but ONE THIRD the weight, only 926 lbs. With a vehicle that is one third the weight, the mileage doubles from the same wattage. Quantum Sphere announced a breakthrough in their lithium ion batteries that produces FOUR TIMES the capacity from the same size cell. Another breakthrough is an electric motor that uses HALF the amount of energy to perform the same amount of work. With this new electric motor, the mileage doubles again. Search: Thor Power: Revolutionary Electric Motor Design Cuts Energy Use in Half. And with that 2000 watts of solar power, we will not be powering the vehicle motor. We will be powering a generator to pulse charge a pack of individual batteries in rapid succession with a pulse width modulator, many times per second. Such a battery charger is being patented. However, researchers can not explain how one battery running a generator can charge a half a dozen other batteries, but they see it happening.

A large percentage of the coming electric and plug in hybrid vehicles will be charged at night when the rates are low, then driven to work and parked all day. If you live in a sunny location, the big pay-off will be Vehicle to Grid (V2G). This concept was originally conceived to transfer a portion of cheap off peak power from your batteries into the daytime peak load grid. You would drive to work, park your car at a V2G receptacle, plug in and tell your car how much power to sell to the grid. Then when you got off work, you would have enough juice left to get home. With advanced technology in a sunny climate, and 2000 additional watts of power to feed into the grid at peak load rates, you would get a lot of credits on your electric bill. All of this will eventually become a standard feature financed into the vehicle, and it will pay for itself. As a last resort, if you ever needed to charge your vehicle away from home, or on a rainy day, you would plug into the V2G system and charge your batteries. The power will go both ways. Feed electric power into the grid for a credit, or draw power out as a debit on your electric bill.

Solar panels, solar glass and solar bodies on vehicles using V2G will soon power your vehicle and the local grid. Visualize whole parking lots of solar equipped electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, capable of feeding the grid, charging, or generating power on the fly. The vehicles of the future will be portable power plants, and their owners will be managers of energy.

The issue should not be about who controls your house, that is just not real.To run the lightest grid at a level playing field, is a real issue.

There are currently sweetheart relationships in the power market that discriminate in favor of heavy users, guaranteeing cheaper rates to major customers.
While this has aided generators with core customers for assured sales , In the greenhouse constrained future, The small user is at risk of shouldering a larger percentage of mitigation costs.

Firstly, these fixed costs per kilowatt and will be strongly resisted by the wholesale consumer.
Secondly in order to see the required participation and efficiency figures.

In Australia many consumers pay a voluntary 'greenpower' rate for renewable sourced energy.
As international emission reductions become a universal expectation, It will be beholden on all consumers to share these costs.

A commercial co able to set the spot price would also be in a good position if unregulated to control the supply and price out on one hand and constrain and direct mitigation costs with the other.
When plainly the costs and benefits in this new Smart grid future are the equal responsibility of all.

Given that the generators are separate to the billing
provider, with transmission co a separate service again.

In this reality, the biller must play fair to all customers as their costs wont change. Each customer pays an account component and a kilowatt price.

The transmission service provider needs their bit, and the generator theirs . By the time the customer receives the service there is no requirement or effective way to determine the cost of any consumer in any locality.

The whole local area could have a rating (as is current practice in US) Including the buy back rate that achieves the required emissions mandate.

This would be similar to registration for motor vehicles, all treated equally(in Australia commercial transport registration and insurance at a higher rate)

I don't see reference to this level of planning in any proposed Smart Grid.
(An unregulated dynamic demand approach is supply, demand + fiddle factor regulated so can be considered fair)

An unregulated monopoly is an invitation to print money. As we are all seeing in the current (economic)
market failure.

@Jeff Baker:

Another breakthrough is an electric motor that uses HALF the amount of energy to perform the same amount of work.

That then must be an electric motor that is >180% efficient. And you expect us to believe that.

The Eliica 8 wheel motor electric car goes over 200 mph and does it TWICE as efficiently as a gasoline powered counterpart. They put one up against a Porsche in a 0 to 100 mpg race and it did it in 7.4 seconds, 2 seconds faster than the Porsche and the driver said it was linear performance from there to 120 miles per hour. That is what an electric car can do with 8 in wheel motors of 80 hp each and enough lithium batteries to get it there (something like 40 kwh).

I mention this to show what a university in Japan did for less than $400k from scratch. They even designed and wound their own motors with industry experts in Japan. This is what the U.S. faces in global competition, but like everyone else, they had to go out and beg for more money to get to the next phase. This is a bit off topic, but I was so impressed with their efforts I wanted to mention it.

http://www.autoblog.com/2005/11/08/kaz-eight-wheeled-eliica-ev-supercar/

I'm very much a proponent of SmartGrid, as long as the pricing is completely transparent and regulated; no more Deathstars and Fatboys.

V2G will also enable greater penetration of solar, wind, and other intermittent renewable energy sources, with V2G vehicles as temporary storage devices and pricing as the demand management scheme.

"by all means reduce your usage of grid power, but there is no need to bring it down to zero"

Why not? The entire environment movement is to limit energy consumption. If a few people can afford to install PV/wind/etc. that alleviates their dependence on utility generated energy - more power to them. Around where we are many people live on non-grid serviced islands. They use combined wind/solar/hydro to meet their entire electric demand - with zero carbon emissions. How green would we be if more people did this?

The reason to push for energy independence is precisely to get off the grid - the world's largest industrial polluter.

@NRG Nut:

Currently, there are motors >90% efficient, so how 84% is a 20% improvement over that, is lost on me.

...reduces losses of electricity by up to 50% compared to today’s antiquated technology...

It's the 'up to', which you need to be aware of (and Jeff Baker obviously wasn't). This doesn't mean it's always twice as efficient, but under some circumstances, compared to some electric motors.

Whenever there's an 'up to x% improvement', ignore the statement, it's marketing babble.

Anne –

You are right. From a normal perspective, motors can be as high as 90% efficient, but these are not mainstream motors which are typically 60% efficient. Hence the Thor claim. The newly announced Keppe motor claims to perform 4 times more work from the same amount of power than conventional motors. What is being discovered is the phenomena that electricity is being underutilized. We are getting multiple reports of this. With conventional motors and schematics, we are only tapping part of the potential energy available. This applies especially to a battery running a motor which is charging multiple batteries. This is perhaps where the Thor motor or the Keppe motor would shine. See: David Bowling’s Continuous Charging Device. Also see: 20 Bedini-Bearden Years “Free Energy Generation” Circuits and Schematics. Since battery charging is a key component of next generation electric and plug-in vehicles. Researchers may have stumbled onto something that goes well beyond our limited knowledge. The Earth is a powerful dynamo with a strong electromagnetic field, and this may be interacting with electricity moving through motors, batteries, and battery chargers, etc. Cutting edge technology evolves through verification.

Switched reluctance motors have less weight and higher efficiency than any motor. V2G is not yet a profitable option. Having a stationary heavy battery might be, and it would also allow for fast vehicle battery charging without the power lines glowing.

With computer controls it is now possible to generate your own electricity easily if you have natural gas, and there is no reason to have very high charges during the day. Honda now sells its unit through climate energy, and their system heats water and the house with the heat that must be used to generate electricity. If the gas grid survives there is now no reason to have an electrical connection for most houses. These systems save %40 of CO2 release over plain heating and buying grid electricity. The average electrical consumption of the US person for all reasons is about 1 kilowatt or 24 kilowatt hours a day. This does not include the stuff made in China. It is more likely that the US natural gas grid should dissappear and that there should be a cheap Nuclear electricity grid for all heating and lighting purposes to save on CO2 releases and save all petroleum products for automobiles and plastics. ..HG..