The HomePlug(R) Powerline Alliance, today announced that Duke Energy, USA, which delivers energy to 4m customers has joined the Alliance's board of directors.

Com Ed will use $5 million in Recovery Act funding for the program, which will initially outfit 8,000 homes with advanced smart meters in order to test how well consumers manage their energy consumption when monitoring and programming are available.

These meters will become part of the smart grid installation currently being deployed by Eltel Networks A/S for the Danish utility SEAS-NVE, in Denmark's largest smart grid project with over 390,000 smart meters. The announcement was made today at the 2010 Smart Metering Scandinavia event in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Power Efficiency, a leading energy procurement and carbon strategy consultancy, has today warned that some of the UK’s 5,000 largest energy users required to take part in the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, may not get the measures to improve their league table performance in place before the close of the first year’s reporting on 31st March 2011.

In an effort to prove the reliability of smart meters, three dozen homes have been fitted with old meters and smart meters side by side in North and Central Texas. Both meters will record usage for the home, allowing Oncor to see whether the smart meter runs faster than the old meter.

Over nine hundred utility executives, government regulators, and engineers met at the Metering America conference this week to discuss the future of energy use and the smart grid.

Commissioner Nancy Ryan of the California Public Utilities Commission. Ryan told the “Metering America” conference that utility rates based on time-of-day pricing related to the cost of producing electricity must be coupled with extensive customer communications and education campaigns, or the effort to align consumers and true market costs will be wasted.

The winners of the 2010 Metering International Excellence Awards for North America were announced during the opening session of Metering, Billing/MDM America 2010 in San Diego, CA, yesterday.

A new report by Zpryme indicates smart grid technology will be a boon for the smart appliance market. From 2011 to 2015, the global household smart appliance market is projected grow from $3.06 billion to $15.12 billion.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s plan to wire the entire United States with high-speed Internet access will be key to creating a nationwide "smart" power grid for reducing wasted electricity, according to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The MB87S2090 and the MB87S2090-F have been developed for communication over power line solutions for automatic meter management.

The 11th Metering, Billing/MDM America gets under way today at the San Diego Marriott in San Diego, CA.

Glendale Water & Power (GWP) has signed the contract for its $20 million federal Smart Grid Investment Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), becoming the first city in the nation to receive smart grid funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

As part of a package of measures to meet future demands on its water resources, Jersey Water is to install island-wide metering over the next five years.

China plans to spend much more than the U.S. or Europe on building out its grid to meet its massive population’s growing energy needs. Projections for China’s budget on smart grid spending is over $7 billion, compared to the US Department of Energy’s projection of $4.5billion.

An analysis of the smart energy market in Texas, sponsored by many leading energy and technology companies in the US, and conducted by Kema, the study examined residential customer awareness, acceptance and value of smart grid enabled electricity offers, home energy technologies and rate plans (“smart energy”).

Amid calls for independent testing of Oncor’s smart meters and a moratorium on further smart meter installations following complaints of increased bills and questions on the accuracy of the meters, the company’s chairman and CEO Bob Shapard has announced that a Smart Meter Verification Plan has been developed.

Elektro Ljubljana has selected Landis+Gyr’s smart metering infrastructure as it starts to create a smart grid environment in the central Slovenian region.

A shift in approach from designing control systems to a focus on enabling technology utilizing smart grid communications holds a key to a larger door into the smart grid revolution, with the expansion of grid technology allowing us to consider a focus on “motivation in lieu of commands” and “information as an alternative to control.”

Hungarian power distribution companies EMASZ Halozati Kft Miskolc and ELMU Halozati Kft Budapest have selected IT solution provider Telvent’s distribution management system (DMS) components for an advanced network control system.