Software & the Smart Grid

[Harvey]

Some people wonder why the Software Association of Oregon is so involved with sustainability that we started the Clean Tech Alliance over a year ago. I've heard a lot of negative feedback in that time - ranging from the subtle "it's interesting..." to the overt "the SAO is forgetting its core mission" or "Clean Tech is more about hardware - green building, solar, wind, etc."

In that time, I've become more convinced that NW software companies that don't see the opportunities are going to miss the most important opportunity of a generation. Here's why:

The Pacific Northwest has always been a leader in environmental movement (well, after we cut down all the old growth...but long before we blew up the Trojan Nuclear Plant). Many software employees can live and work anywhere in the world, but choose to live here because of the community's sustainable ethos. If all they wanted was to make money, they would live in the Valley - the NW is about lifestyle & working together to do amazing things.

The Pacific Northwest has an inordinate amount of solar & wind manufacturing, a complex and geographically distributed electrical grid, talented utility leadership, brilliant university researchers, elected officials that are setting the standards for incentives in clean energy production, a strong DIY (do it yourself) culture and all the natural resources needed to create sustainable electrical production. From wind power in the Gorge, solar power east of the Cascades, wave energy along the coast, thermal energy along the Cascades & in Southern Oregon will grow by double-digits in the next 10 years...and software is going to play a huge part in that growth.

Energy grids are built on old technology and will be thoroughly upgraded in order to support the new government sustainability standards, population growth, residential electrical production and implementation of new technologies. Current tax incentives will be upgraded by the Obama administration to spur wider involvement by companies and individuals in this massive transformation.

Software tools, ethics, skills and principles are needed in the upcoming energy transformation. We in the software industry have already been through the massive transformation of the telecommunications industry to support the internet economy (remember when they weren't synonymous?). The parallels of the software experience to the upcoming sustainable energy transformation are many: substitute telecommunications for utilities, computers for appliances and inverters, asynchronous information exchange for asynchronous electrical production, distributed packets of information for coordinated residential, commercial & utility energy production, upload & download speeds for energy usage/production...I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

The major differences between the transformation to the internet and the tranformation to the "smart grid" is the enormity of scale and risk. Instead of creating a new economy centered on the distribution of information from a box with little economic downside if we failed (as we did with the internet), we're going to be transforming the existing electrical infrastructure fundamental to our lives & livelihood, create massive conservation savings, build a new and distributed energy production economy, create sustainable economic opportunities in rural areas, redesign every appliance in every household and business to communicate to this grid and recreate our systems of transportation to run off of electricity. The risk: the economy could have a massive brownout and the planet could, in coding terminology, crash.

Here are some examples of local leading software companies - or renewable energy companies that are dependent on software - who are recreating the electrical grid:

Powermand
MicroPlanet
NextPhase
Better Power Lines
Formos
Porteon
PV Powered

Thoughts? Comments? Arguments?