EV charging

• UK govt mandates a charger for every new home from next year
• UK utility Ovo (which owns SSE, and is 20% owned by Mitsubishi) is trialling V2G using their Kaluza platform
• JustPark and Octopus launch FleetCharge, a new off-street charging initiative
• Shell aims to install 50k chargers by 2025 – one third of the UK's on-street EV charging 
• Two reports from April are worth a read:
  • IEA's Global EV Outlook (though PV vendors know that IEA forecasts can be insanely pessimistic)
  • BCG's Winning the battle in the EV Charging Ecosystem" analyses how the value chain could evolve, and which parts will end-up being most valuable

Smart Energy

• As UK gas and electricity wholesale prices reach record highs, two small UK energy suppliers collapse – and the UK uses coal generation to fill a lull in wind generation (coal will be completely gone from our mix by 2025)
• In August the UK's DCC added a record 1m smart meters to its network, two thirds of which are existing SMETS1 meters and 315,000 new installs, to reach 14m meters overall
• A Tesla Megapack delivering 99 MW/198 MWh is being deployed in the UK, which will use their Autobidder software
• 480,000 UK homes today are warmed by 14,000 heat networks, and the UK government now aims to massively boost this by launching a £270m Green Heat Networks Fund, aimed mainly at heat pumps and geothermal
• Delta EE's recent presentation on the State of the New Energy Market had some surprises, including that Auto OEMs are getting involved in Smart Buildings
• Another Delta-EE paper on Transactive Energy highlights the risk to DNOs of having all the costs of being a carrier without being able to benefit from the market – seems like a clear analogy with the complaints of broadband operators 20 years ago

IoT

• I asked Nodle for updated stats so they sent me this snapshot and said that in 24 hours, in the UK alone, Nodle collected 25m messages from 1.2m IoT devices, via 27k edge nodes (smartphones)
• LTE450 – interesting to see the very low frequency 450MHz band being used for long-range, deep-penetration IoT
• As NVidia's acquisition of ARM continues to run up against government scrutiny (in UK and EU) Russian CPU vendor Mikron delivers a RISC V processor, similar to the M0, ARM's most basic embedded processor
• A new "side-channel" security attack vector is wireless charging. Using the timing of power consumption spikes, researchers could distinguish which website a user was browsing. Reminds me of how German researchers detected which TV programmes people were watching by observing household power consumption. I'd file both under "interesting but not worrying" since the attack is scalable only if an attacker can get inside the firmware of the charger or meter
• "Approximately 0% of microprocessors are used in computers" – a nice quote from this Edge IoT article.
• Two interesting stats from Samsung's survey of their SmartThings users:
  • 61% of SmartThings Energy users think they have saved energy
  • SmartThings Find helps people locate 230,000 items a day
• The EU is consulting on legislation for IoT security

Internet of Shit

• iRobot doesn't eat its own dogfood
• 83m video cameras suffer from a vulnerability in the Kalay platform, letting attackers remotely watch live video and gain access to your network
• Terrifyingly, the US has allowed their HIIDE biometric database identifying those who helped them in Afghanistan to fall into the hands of the Taliban

Until next month.

-Pilgrim

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