Innovation

As renewable energy becomes the base upon which society operates, how will utilities manage unbalanced production and overproduction? Advances in communications technology, or the Industrial Internet, promise to channel energy to where it is most demanded via sensors and automatic communication between machines. Efficiently connecting supply and demand will grow with the increased ubiquity of our M2M devices and their potential for sensing energy needs across a myriad of platforms. VerdeXchange News reprints the following with the permission of ThomasNet News.

Bruce Katz, Vice President at the Brookings Institution, co-authored The Metropolitan Revolution. VerdeXchange News has printed a piece adapted from this book below, which originally appeared online as part of LinkedIn’s Influencer’s series. Mr. Katz discusses how innovation districts—clusters of anchor institutions and innovative firms, along with related companies, mixed use housing, office, and retail—are taking the place of traditional corporate campuses, and what impact this will have on cities moving forward.

In this VerdeXchange News interview, James Kelly, formerly of Southern California Edison and now a strategic advisor to GRIDiant Corporation, among other startups, discusses the role of Embedded Network Sensing (ENS) in generating data, how improved data analytics will affect the management of the electrical grid, and what the evolution of data portends for the physical worlds of industry and utility. As alternative energies and power sources gain support in state and local government, stronger tools for monitoring the electric grid will be necessary for balancing supply and demand.

The inaugural VerdeXchange Arizona conference in October will bring together business leaders and politicians who are helping to build Arizona and the west through sustainability, infrastructure and international business projects.

Is everything about the smart grid - smart? James Kelly, former Senior Vice President of Regulatory and Environmental Policy for Southern California Edison, and current strategic advisor to GRIDiant Corporation, ARES, and many other start-ups, may be one of the most experienced experts to ask. In this VerdeXchange interview, Kelly calls upon his own utility and entrepreneurial background to chart the fast-evolving changes and innovations of today’s smart grid sector. The success of the smart grid, he notes, depends as much on regulation, collaboration, and proper implementation as it does on burgeoning technology.

Tom Rand is a well-known investor and entrepreneur and is the Cleantech Practice Lead Advisor at theMaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Canada. Ahead of an LAEDC trade mission to Toronto, VX asks Rand how markets are beginning to reflect the realities of climate change and what parallels exist between cleantech investment in California and Canada. Rand notes that as the pressures of climate change emerge, industries across all sectors, from mining to forestry to manufacture, will have to plan carefully to reduce carbon emissions as part of staying flexible with a changing economy. <See: http://vxcanada.ca/>