Having grown up where snow up to the windows was normal, it is with amazement that I view my fellow Southeastern Pennsylvanians dealing with serious snow. Two honest-feet fell Friday night; and, another two feet are predicted starting tomorrow night. Pretty crazy. Unless you are a denialist or a meteorologist, looking out the window, you’d think the climate had c…Read the full story on TreeHugger

What Can We Learn From The Highways in the Sky
Science recently published a study titled “Flight Orienta…Read the full story on TreeHugger

The UN’s top climate official and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, has penned a novel that reportedly mixes global warming lectures with steamy sex scenes involving a male protagonist that resembles Pachauri himself. An engineer by training, Pachauri has endured the recent failings in Copenhagen and the recent attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over charges that the group wasn’t careful enough when editing their 2007 global warming assessment….Read the full story on TreeHugger

A recently published report is exposing some shocking exploitation of the Amazon’s natural resources–and this times it…Read the full story on TreeHugger

Lux Research forecast last week that the global smart grid market will
grow some 250% over the next five years, reaching nearly $16 billion by
2015 compared with today’s $4.5 billion. Interestingly, Lux further
forecast that only a few select firms will take full advantage of this
looming largesse.

It’s understandable why the payoff won’t be widely shared. As regulated
entities (on the transmission and distribution side), electric
utilities have an obligation (specifically, the time-honored
“obligation to serve”) that effectively requires that they be
conservative when partnering with IT firms that can provide the
money-saving, blackout-avoiding technologies which are at the heart of
the smart grid. In other words, big is better.

This is why most of the more than $11 billion of new smart-grid-related
revenue that Lux expects to be generated over the next five years will
be pocketed by the IT beasts that already are pocketing the yeoman’s
share of the $4.5 billion currently being spent.

For at least one firm – demand response leader href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/enernoc/">EnerNOC
(ENOC) — the potential payoff is life-changing, and only further
adds to my purely personal suspicion that EnerNOC is going to be
acquired at some point by a much larger firm.

Two logical buyers of EnerNOC would be href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/accenture/">Accenture
(ACN) and href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/ibm/">IBM (IBM).
The two are jockeying for leadership in the rapidly-developing
smart-grid analysis and services market, which Lux Research believes is
“poised for explosive growth” led by demand response applications.

Still another IT behemoth in line to gobble up billions of new
smart-grid revenue is href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/cisco/">Cisco
Systems (CSCO). Think of Cisco as the smart grid’s Mr. Goodwrench.
Whether it’s routers, switches or other equipment, Cisco’s goal is to
provide the IT components that utilities (with the help of consultants
led by Accenture and IBM) will fashion into a system that automates the
power industry from end to end – from generation to transmission to
distribution to consumption.

DISCLOSURE: No position.

DISCLAIMER: This is a news article.  Please read
terms
and policy.

Bill Paul is Managing Editor of href="http://www.energytechstocks.com/">EnergyTechStocks.com.

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