Power line communications now being used in more and more scenarios
I had a nice catch-up call with Mike Holt the other day – Mike is Semitech Semiconductor’s VP Sales and Marketing and we had previously talked last August. Mike was bringing me up to speed on what has been going on with Semitech in the last five months. Semitech make semiconductor chips specially designed for [...]
Friday Green Numbers round-up 09/03/2010
And here is this week’s Green numbers: 1.25 Gigawatts of Solar Thermal Power Approved in California in Past Two Days Will Double US Capacity “There’ve been multiple gigawatts of solar thermal power plants planned for various places in the California desert for some time, but finally some more of them are getting the approvals need [...]
Understanding the Smart Grid – my TreeHugger interview
Jaymi Heimbuch contacted me recently to ask if I’d agree to be interviewed for a TreeHugger article she was planning to write on Smart Grids. “Love to”, I said. Jaymi sent on the questions, I replied and today she posted the interview on TreeHugger. Here are the questions and my answers: TH: What’s the biggest [...]
Smart Meters: PG&E Lost What Little Credibility They Still Had
This one sentence sums it up: After months of denying any technical problems with its SmartMeter program, PG&E publicly detailed a range of glitches Monday affecting tens of thousands of the digital meters. [From PG&E details technical problems with SmartMeters - San Jose Mercury News] This is the first time that PG&E has publicly acknowledged [...]
Hacker Disables Cars via the Web – Our Remote Controlled Life
This is what remote controlled toy cars looked like when I was a kid. Yes, the control box was connected to the car with a 3-4feet cable… not exactly the level of freedom you get with today’s wireless models. But it was fun, nevertheless. I wonder if 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez had a toy car when [...]
Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Silver Springs Networks’ Raj Vaswani
This is the third of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the CTO of Silver Springs Networks, Raj Vaswani.
It was a great interview – in it we talked about:
Raj’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
The fact that, to-date Smart Grids are quite notional
How long it will be [...]
PG&E smart meter communication failure – lessons for the rest of us
Photo credit svale
What we have got here is a failure to communicate
The famous line from legendary movie Cool Hand Luke is the first thing that comes to mind when one hears about the fiasco which PG&E’s smart meter rollout in Bakersfield Ca. has become.
From the report on the SmartMeters.com site:
a class-action lawsuit has been [...]
There’s gold in them thar bills!
Photo credit Urban Jacksonville
The output from smart meters is incredibly granular. Far more so than is obvious from the smart meter output graph above.
In conversations with Dr Monica Sturm (Director of Siemen’s Center of Competence, Metering Services) last November (2008) she confirmed to me that it is possible to identify individual devices in someone’s [...]
