Who's Best Equipped To Dominate Smart Grid Analytics?
Here’s an article that raises some interesting points about the future of smart grid. Billionaire Tom Siebel of customer relationship management fame is asserting that companies like his, whose expertise is enterprise software, are going to be the leaders in smart grid analytics, rather than the hardware giants like GE and Siemens. This strikes me as a similar argument to the one that Bob Lutz, ex-co-chairman of GM, made about the future of electric vehicles, where he posited that only car companies can build cars, and that smart people shouldn’t be looking for Silicon Valley to enter the auto market with any success.
Obviously, the jury is still out here. The automotive world is rightfully pretty impressed with what Tesla has done with its ability to deliver something stylish, profoundly appealing, and incredibly innovative in an industry that has been dominated by rehashing old ideas and actively repelling innovation. If the Tesla case study means anything at all, it’s hard to rule out new players with new ideas competing effectively in important industries.
Next week I’m headed to the East Coast for a series of meetings, heading north from Washington DC to Philadelphia to Newark (NJ), and finally New York. Where I would love to do all this intercity travel by train, I’ll need to rent a car for the first few stops, drop it off in Trenton and take the train from there.
Perhaps the largest impediment to the adoption of electric vehicles is owners’ worry about the battery, i.e. what happens when it reaches the end of its life and needs to be replaced. When you think about it, there are no analogies anywhere in a consumer’s life: the purchase of a roughly $10,000 item that becomes worthless over a period of a few years.
Even though fossil fuels are used to generate power in most homes in Australia, environment friendly people still prefer clean, renewable sources of energy like sun. Be it home or business, the demand of solar energy is gripping very fast.
Social media has a lot more uses than just posting cute pics of you and your besties on a fun night out.
Gone are the days when people were totally dependent upon the electricity from the power grids and even then remained upset with frequent black outs and heavy power bills. But now it is the era of sustainable energy, a type that is readily available at your service at any point of your life.
The winter chills are setting in and your house is freezing (Really? It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, where far more than 90% of the world’s population lives. -ed.) You want to install a heater but you’re not sure which one to buy; which one is the most affordable outright, vs. which one has the lowest ongoing costs? Which heater is the right size for my current home (“my?” You switched from the 2nd to the 1st person? Why? – ed.), but also offers the option of extension if I decide to add more rooms? And perhaps most importantly, which heater is the safest system to heat my room? These are some questions you may ask yourself as the colder months approach and you become desperate for a heating solution. 
