By Nick Hodge of GreenChipStocks.com
Get your Free Cleantech Report Today!
You can often get a pretty good pulse on emerging cleantech themes by reading the pages of the Green Chip Review.
Going over my articles from the past two months, I noticed a clear trend: water and smart grid are the themes of the day.
And it’s not hard to see why.
The American Southwest and Southeast are three years into the … Read the rest
Several days ago Itron (ITRI), the smart grid 800lb gorilla, reported disappointing earnings. Today, the unprofitable up and comers EnerNoc (ENOC) and Echelon (ELON) reported large losses but losses that were considerably less than the estimates.
Echelon (ELON) reported a non GAAP loss of .19/share which beat estimates of a loss of .34 by a wide margin. Revenues also came in better than expected at $18.2 million vs the estimate of $17.8 million. Despite … Read the rest
Badger Meter plans to move some of its unskilled positions from its plant in Brown Deer, WI to a new plant in Nogales, Mexico. The move will allow Badger Meter to reduce its labor costs. The company says some of its meters will still be produced in Wisconsin, and it wouldn’t comment on how exactly how many jobs will shifted from Wisconsin to Nogales.
In an article for the Milwaukee Business Journal, President and CEO … Read the rest
EnerNoc has successfully deployed its PowerTalk technology in 250 of its approximately 5000 customer sites which allows for real time communication through open standards technology between almost any internet enabled smart meter or device and the EnerNoc command center. Similar to instant messaging, the presence technology continuously transmits the status of the device as well as other info so that changing conditions are detected in real time.
Whereas most current technical approaches involve reading Smart … Read the rest
Companies involved in the smart grid should do very well in the future, but for now the behemoth in this space, Itron (ITRI) will have to wait to benefit. The company just reported an awful quarter reporting an EPS of .33/share missing estimates by .07/share on revenues of $389 million. That’s a 20% haircut on revenues over last year and a 60% plunge in earnings.
The CEO understated the poor the quarter, calling it “soft”. … Read the rest
This is exciting…Echelon and T-Mobile just announced that they have formed a partnership that will allow Echelon to use T-Mobile’s GSM wireless network to connect its smart meters with utility companies. Under the agreement, T-Mobile will provide special, heavy-duty silicon SIM cards that will be embedded into Echelon’s smart meters. The SIM cards can then be used to wirelessly communicate data on electricity uses and outages by sending it to the utility company via … Read the rest
General Electric, Florida Power and Light, Cisco Systems and Silver Springs Networks just announced that the four companies will team up to build a smart grid to serve the city of Miami. The new program, which will be called Energy Smart Miami, involves installing smart meters in more than 1 million Miami homes and businesses, as well as constructing an automated smart grid to support the smart meters. The program should create approximately 1,000 new … Read the rest
General Electric (GE) reported earnings Friday morning and I’ve now had a chance to go through the entire earnings report provided by Seeking Alpha and pick out all portions related to their smart grid wind turbine businesses. Overall, their Energy unit was the strongest performer with revenues up 7% and profits up 19% Unfortunately, that wasn’t due to wind turbine orders which were down 8% for the quarter. Although, when you consider that the 1st … Read the rest
Itron (ITRI) subsidiary Actaris announced this morning a deal with Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority for 140K smart electricity meters which will be deployed across the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and fully integrated in an AMR fixed network . This is a follow on contract after a successful implementation of 60K meters that allows ADWEA to remotely access all metering and operating data and instantly vaults Actaris to the throne as the largest smart … Read the rest
A hat tip to Earth2Tech for laying out the components in the $410 omnibus bill that represent clean energy and climate change. The “imperfect omnibus bill” was signed into law by Obama today behind closed doors. Here’s to more government waste but at least there are some clean energy bucks in there..
* EPA gets $7.6 billion (increase of $174 million over last year). $224 million for grants to states to implement the Clean Air … Read the rest