From our Green Committee: What Do You Know About the Smart Grid?

You may have seen recent press reports that venture investors are pumping billions of dollars into energy innovation. Apparently, there are also billions of dollars in government grants going into developing energy technologies.

All this capital is creating substantial new opportunities here in the Silicon Valley. With that in mind, what do you know about the smart grid? When you think about the power grid of yester-year, negative events like power outages during hot weather and price gouging from interstate energy contracts may come to mind.

However, if the smart grid is everything that is being said about it, benefits will include reduced energy consumption, increased reliability and potentially tens of billions of dollars in savings for businesses. It may also be a source for thousands of new jobs. Given these kinds of opportunities, in addition to the host of big names associated with the smart grid like PG&E, Oracle and Cisco, there may be hundreds of venture backed entities doing what they can to capitalize on smart grid potential.

So as you find yourself talking to people from these companies, Bert Taube, chair of our chapter’s Green Committee, has provided you with a smart grid glossary to give you an enhanced perspective into the smart grid.

Additional information about the smart grid can be found in this article in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Chapter News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.