GE is targeting European researchers, seeking to enlist the sharpest minds from Helsinki to Madrid for a €160m Ecomagination smart grid competition. With this huge war chest, GE and four venture capital partners aim to unleash a critical mass of capital and brainpower, to speed next-generation grid technologies to market and power a new era of cleaner, more efficient “digital energy.”

GE’s Ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Smart Grid,” will fund five awards of €80,000 each to individuals or companies for breakthrough technologies, services and business models that accelerate development of an intelligent energy grid. Meanwhile, the balance of the €160m will be deployed as growth capital for promising start-ups and concepts.   

“The GE ecomagination challenge is looking for the best ideas that will help create smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grids and accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies,” said Nani Beccalli, president and CEO of GE International, launching the European challenge at GE’s Global Research Labs in Munich.

Next generation grid technologies will include: smart meters giving control to consumers of their energy consumption, sensors for load balancing, new storage technologies enabling intermittent and dispersed renewable energy solar arrays around the Mediterranean, offshore wind power from the North Sea, and wave and water derived energies to be integrated into Europe’s electricity networks.  

“If you look at the electricity grid, we are standing in front of a huge need for an entire overhaul of the system,” says Carlos J. Haertel, director of GE Global Research, Europe.  “The timing is right.  We have to set the stage for large-scale demos and start developing the technology solutions now.”

From Scotland, Smarter Grid Solutions awarded a Smarter Grid grant in March of £75,000, has expanded into new Glasgow offices and signed a  Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Chicago-based S&C Electric. It seems highly likely to be one Ecomagination contendor.

Europe  key role smart grid deployment

Its electricity networks are more advanced than those in the US, say experts, giving it a more modern base on which to upgrade.  The European Commission also made the drive for a low-carbon economy top priority. In June 3, it launched a €2bn smart grid initiative, as part of a 2020 Strategic Energies Technology (SET) Plan to develop large scale demo projects – the costly last step prior to taking new technology to market.

“Historically, the EU always had money for R&D but not a lot for actual deployment.  The EU’s SET Plan is an incentive to deploy new technologies and reap their benefits,” says Keith Redfearn, head of GE’s transmission and distribution business in Europe.

Smaller smart grid pilots are underway already in countries including Germany, UK, France, Italy and Austria.  In one project, GE is working with German utility RWE and the University of Stuttgart to develop components for advanced energy storage on the smart grid of the future. Given the right conditions, Europe can become, “A leading hub in low-carbon innovation,” said Beccalli.  

GE’s goal is to act as a catalyst for private sector innovation. But it acknowledges public officials have a key role in ensuring the framework conditions exist to deploy 21st century grids.

“The public role starts having the right legal framework for generating and processing data for individual households – and regulating pricing for electric power.  That can have a significant impact on how quickly you deploy the smart grid,” said Tore Land, head of the Ecomagination Challenge.

The core challenge in building smarter grids is to graft information and communications technology onto ageing transmission networks, showing where energy is used in real time. This is vital to improve efficiency and integrate rising volumes of wind, solar and water energies into the existing electricity infrastructure.

Redfearn pointed to two key areas for breakthrough: low-cost sensors to effectively measure network performance and low-cost communications to get information to consumers, utilities and distributors. Technologies can also help to cut energy currently lost in transmission and distribution by as much as 10%. “Distribution utilities haven’t been incentivised to reduce losses before now,” he said says.

US Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse

In October last year Virginia Tech was awarded a $1.25m 5-year contract by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to develop, manage, and maintain a public Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse (SGIC) web portal that encourages use of electricity in an environmentally responsible way. The award was part of $47m in funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for eight projects to further smart grid demonstration projects in seven states.

Project partners IEEE and the EnerNex Corp assisted with content, including demonstration projects, use cases, standards, legislation, policy and regulation, lessons learned and best practices, and advanced topics dealing with R&D and the beta site was launched for comment and reaction.

Saifur Rahman (right) director of the Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute is principal investigator for the Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse portal and noted that Virginia Tech was "very pleased to be chosen as the only team in the US to develop, manage, and maintain the Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse web portal. This will give us the opportunity to interact with governments, industries, regulatory agencies, and professional associations - both in the US and globally - who are actively engaged in this new technology."

The SGIC portal is designed to serve as a repository for public smart grid information and to direct its users to other pertinent sources or databases for additional data, case studies, etc.

It is to facilitate direct sharing and dissemination of smart grid information among various stakeholders on knowledge gained, lessons learned, and best practices. It will serve as a decision support tool for both state and federal regulators in deliberations for rule-making and evaluating  investments impact in the smart grid technologies and in software.

"We envision the portal as the essential gateway that connects a smart grid community to the relevant sources of information that are currently scattered and distributed on the worldwide web," said Rahman.

The beta site even found an Ecomagination project.