Peter Santangeli - Photo by Adrian Tuck

Greenbox founder, Peter Santangeli, headed to Washington DC last week to meet with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and other industry stakeholders at the White House for a leadership meeting on the creation of a set of national standards for the Smart Grid. We considered it an honor to be invited to such an event.

Following the leadership meeting, Peter also attended a two-day workshop on Smart Grid standards sponsored by NIST.

If you’d like to learn more about Smart Grid interoperability or standards recognized for inclusion in the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework visit the NIST Smart Grid Website.

Like a lot of other folks in this industry, including blog Earth2Tech, we at Greenbox are keeping an eye on Washington where the details of the climate bill proposed by Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are deep in the sausage factory.

Among the compromises we’re sorry to see is the elimination of a seperate Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, or EERS which as been cut in the current version of the bill. Basically an EERS sets targets for utilities to reduce energy consumption though efficiency programs and demand reduction.

California is among the states with an EERS in place due to state regulation, but I was hoping to see a national standard put in place. Inexpensive programs to boost efficiency can reduce demand consumption by 20%. And the good in that isn’t just cost savings for consumers and more jobs for a growing industry — it’s the collective shrinking of a national carbon footprint.

Still, the current bill is a big step in the right direction. We’ll keep watching.

You may have seen this story in the San Francisco Business Times last month, “Tech startups lose out on fed’s stimulus.” The headline was nothing short of depressing and in the story Lindsay Riddell described the challenges that small startups face when looking at the prospect of getting a piece of the $787 billion fed stimulus. Greenbox was among the companies mentioned, identified as small, smart startups with cool technology but unlikely to provide the jobs hit necessary to qualify for stimulus funding.

Well, less than a month after that article first appeared: We’re happy to report that Greenbox has fielded several requests from utilities and other entities who are applying for stimulus funding and including the Greenbox platform as their customer-facing technology as part of their application.

Greenbox is a great fit for the aims of the stimulus for two big reasons. First we have the technology that utilities need to bring the smart grid to their customers. And second, a core part of our mission is to help build up a growing, job-creating industry around energy efficiency through recommendations via the Greenbox platform.

Will the utilities we’re working with qualify for stimulus based on what they’re submitting? That part remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

This week NPR has been running a series of stories on the smart grid and how it will impact residential households. It was great to see them go a bit deeper into the story and tease out the fact that the smart meter is only a foundational technology and doesn’t itself provide direct consumer value. They pointed out that it’s the applications that are built on top of and leverage this infrastructure are the ones that will deliver the true value to consumers.

Check out this quote:

“But PPL and other utilities that have begun installing the smart meters are finding that you need more than just the meters to help customers save power — there needs to be some kind of informational device, like a Web site, that will tell customers how much power they’re using. “

Enter Greenbox… This story is a great validation of our market and what we are working to accomplish as a company. It’s great to see the main stream media getting on board!

Full Story Here