Vancouver brain trust

Silicon Forest Electronics, which assembles circuit boards and other high-tech equipment for the defense, aerospace and medical equipment industries at its Vancouver facility, is one local company starting to explore the smart grid market. It would be "easy" for the manufacturer of air-to-ground communications for fighter jets to adapt its production process for smart grid communications, for example, said Jay Schmidt, sales and marketing manager for Silicon Forest Electronics.

"We like the idea of diversifying our market," Schmidt said. "And smart grid is a growth industry."

Underwriters Laboratories, a Chicago-based product testing and safety certification company that employs 400 workers in Camas, has already stepped into the market testing smart meters, devices predicted to eventually replace standard electrical meters in every U.S. home and business. And the company is working with utilities, regulators and other stakeholders to develop new performance requirements for a range of smart devices, said Clyde Kofman, senior vice president of commercial operations for UL in the Internet. The company is also designing sensors for smart appliances, such as a computer that senses motion and shuts down when a person isn't present. Sharp plans to eventually include such "grid-aware" and energy management capabilities in all of its consumer appliances and much of that design work will happen locally, said Carl Mansfield, senior manager of energy systems at nearby Sharp Laboratories.

Over the long term, Sharp Laboratories is engineering the company's solar photovoltaic systems to talk to the electric grid. As electrical generation moves away from central power plants and toward distributed resources such as solar panels, power supplies will become harder for utilities to manage. Smart solar panels would allow coordination of energy generated on hundreds of rooftops to help supplement electricity from traditional power plants when electricity is in high demand.

Entry point

Despite the large potential market for smart grid technologies, utilities and high-tech companies are still waiting to rollout new products and services until it's clear such investments are cost effective. Some technologies such as advanced metering are easy to justify, said Rob Pratt, energy and environment director at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, in an e-mail. But prices will need to come down before companies will invest in smart grid technologies related to distributed generation and energy storage, he said.

"The business case for the smart grid as a whole has not been unequivocally made to everyone's satisfaction," said Pratt.