It's been a very busy month. New technologies, human factors, lessons of history, connecting-up the siloes, the battle of the gateways, network effects, intermittency, designing and deploying an agile tariff (from scratch in 4 days!), APIs, financing - these topics and more were all covered in our fascinating panel session last month: The Future of Smart Home Energy. 

There's truly nothing new under the sun: Reader Phil Claridge tells me that back in 1982 he worked on a 1,000-home trial of smart meters for water, gas and electricity, with dynamic load control.  And a correction from last month: Matt Roderick of Wondrwall kindly pointed-out that last year's massive spurt in UK Smart Meter connections was mainly driven by migrating old SMETS1 meters across to SMETS2 - great to know these weren't stranded.

Worth watching Octopus's founder Greg Jackson discussing their Kraken platform, the importance of "elec-tech" and price signals, in Episode 32 of Cleaning-Up, Michael Liebreich's excellent podcast about energy technology.

In other news:

• Bulb #1, Octopus #26, EO charging #30 - congrats to all the Smart Energy companies at the top of the FT's Top 1000 fastest-growing companies.
• DevicePilot
  • Delighted to have been listed in the Top 25 Private IoT companies by IoTNation
  • IoT Tech News kindly gave me a slot to discuss AWS IoT Fleet Hub
  • Great to see plenty else happening in "our" Service Monitoring space:
    • IoTOps company SecuriThings raises $14m
    • Waylay launches Digital Twins
• EV:
  • Chargepoints globally continue to more than double every 2 years
  • The biggest UK utility, British Gas, was an early triallist of EVs and has now committed to 100% electric fleet (12,000 vans) by 2025, while pulling forward its net zero commitment to 2045.
  • It's reported that the UK government is removing Ecotricity's monopoly on motorway charging (actually I think GridServe will be working with Ecotricity)
  • Princeton academic suggests that in the CAV era pedestrians will be safer if they are radar reflective
• IoT telco:
  • Telus invests £15m in their new partner ESeye
  • Even as DoCoMo turns-off NB-IoT in Japan, Deutsche Telekom doubles-down, enabling NB-IoT roaming in 20 countries
• Market forecasts: 
  • IoT Analytics has raised its forecast of IoT growth driven by accelerating adoption in China and by LPWA adoption CAGR of 43%
  • Even in an era of hyperbolic market forecasts, $85bn by 2026 for IoT in Energy seems a bit strong - but who knows?
• Long reads:
  • A provocative piece from Maarten Ectors of Legal and General: The future of energy = oversupply?
  • Not specific to IoT, but this BCG strategy paper on digitalisation makes some interesting observations
  • Yuval Noah Harari's "Lessons on COVID 19" is well worth a read
  • Legacy business wondering how to engage with IoT ecosystems? You might like to read MIT Review's Tethered Digital Platforms
• Pascal Bodin's long list of IoT platforms (including all the defunct ones) makes interesting reading - he has maintained this since 2014
• Paperinode continues to be an interesting project. Leveraging commodity e-paper displays, LoRAWAN standards (The Things Network) and the Arduino hobbyist framework, it provide "energy autarky" (freedom from batteries) which in many applications can be transformational. Thus device lifetime is likely to be limited by radio standards compatibility, rather than by battery life.
• It was fun sharing the "7 minutes of terror" as Perseverance landed on Mars. Here's how the landing video taken from the sky crane was streamed down coiled gigabit Ethernet cable to Perseverance, which then transmits it directly to Earth. Next month its helicopter drone Ingenuity will launch, running open source flight software.

Finally, this month's Internet of Shit award must go to Siemens, for starting a software update on a smart cooking hob while it's in use.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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