It's ARPA-E day in the US.

Today is the day that all interested parties get to step up and give notice to ARPA-E of new and transformative ideas. There are 8 topic areas, 30+ sub-topics and even a catch-all bag called "Other".
While I've little expectation of being awarded and ARPA-E grant, (It's that pragmatic side of me that tells me don't get your hopes up with 5000+ applicants submitting proposals!) I do use these events as a driver to collect my thoughts on various aspects of our transformational, evolutional, path to the future:)

Last year, we proposed the "EnergyOS: GridNOC" project and also "A Control Architecture for Urban Microgrids". Nice titles and topics to drive us forward. While these were not ARPA-E funded, we are now in the happy position of leveraging the ideas percolated through the ARPA-E experience into showcase pilot installations in Nagasaki Japan and Xiamen China. This validates the return on effort put forward in our participation in the  ARPA-E process!

This year, we have collected our working team (Intel Microgrid Labs and Nextek Power Systems) to provide 4 topics for consideration. These are, again, at the forefront of our view of the needs of the market place and levarage forward on our success of the past 12 months.

So we will see how the following fare:

• Title 1: DC Infrastructure, Aggregated Contextual Data Streams, and Holistic Operational Management in Buildings

• Title 2: Managing Consumer Behavior & Aggregated Energy Markets: Consumer Engagement through Gamification, Social Motivation, and Community Economic Flows

• Title 3: DC Power Management in High Performance Data Centers

• Title 4: EnergyOS: Building an Open Source Energy Infrastructure

Interesting topics and ones that, if they should happen, would provide critical elements in our transformed energy infrastructure.  Of course, like last year, we won't wait to change the future!!

People Power - Enabling Green Button and our Transformed Energy Economy!!

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