Much has been written about the impact on the smart grid market of Toshiba’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Landis+Gyr. However, I want to pick up on one aspect of the announcement that has had less coverage. As well as making it a leading player in the global smart grid market, Toshiba has said that it sees the acquisition as a key step in its plans to be a global leader in smart community development. Toshiba’s vision puts the capabilities acquired with Landis+Gyr in a broader context that includes closer integration with a range of energy, transport, and building services. This is a vision that needs to be understood not only with regard to Toshiba but also the ambitions of Japan’s other leading manufacturing, engineering, and electronics companies.

As we show in the recently published Pike Research Smart Cities report, there are immense opportunities for companies that can provide an integrated approach to diverse challenges facing cities and other communities as they struggle to balance the need for economic vitality with a concern for sustainable growth and a constant pressure to improve citizen services. Toshiba, for example, expects its smart communities business to be worth 900 billion yen ($11 billion) by 2015.

Toshiba’s vision is part of a broader drive by the Japanese industry to lead the world in developing and deploying smart communities. Japan has been developing a significant program for smart cities for some time. In 2008, the Japanese government established its Eco-Model City program, initially involving six cities, to which seven more cities were added in 2009. The cities selected offer a variety of population, geographical, and industry profiles from small towns focused on a single industry to Yokahama, with more than 3.5 million people.

Yokohama was one of the original six Eco-Model Cities but it also launched its own smart city project in 2010 in partnership with consortium of seven Japanese companies, including Toshiba, Nissan, Panasonic, Tokyo Electric Power, Tokyo Gas, Accenture’s Japan unit, and Meidensha. This is five-year project focused on three main areas of the city and spanning around 170,000 households. The goals for the project are to reduce CO2 emissions by around 64,000 t-CO2. It will involve the deployment of 27 MW of photovoltaic systems, a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) in around 4,000 households, and the deployment of around 2,000 electric vehicles. The project has a total budget of 74 billion yen (approximately $900,000) over five years.

The role of leading Japanese companies in the project is mirrored elsewhere. Panasonic recently announced that it is working with eight other companies on a 60 billion yen ($750 million) “sustainable smart town” development in Fujisawa City in Kanagawa Prefecture. In its home town of Toyota, Toyota Motor Company is leading the implementation of several demonstration projects around sustainable transport including a plug-in hybrid car-sharing system, the development of solar power-based charging infrastructure and the deployment of an Intelligent Transportation Systems to reduce traffic congestion and prioritize public transit.

Japanese companies are not just developing these concepts in Japan. They are also actively participating in smart city projects in the United States, France, Spain, India, and China. For example, Hitachi and Mitsubishi are working with the Malaga SmartCity project in Spain to demonstrate the viability of the Japanese approach to smart communities. The opportunity to export smart community technology and insights is a strong driver in the overall program. The common vision shared by the Japanese government and the country’s leading technology companies is shown by the creation of the Japan Smart Community Alliance (JSCA) to strengthen collaboration among interested organizations and to support the dissemination of information and preparation of roadmaps to achieve global standardization. JSCA has members from the electric power, gas, automobile, ICT, electric machinery, construction, and retail industries as well as the public sector and academia.

The collaborative approach between leading companies and central and local government is similar to the model that the European Commission is hoping to drive forward with its soon-to-be-launched Smart Cities Industry Initiative. The European Commission is already funding several demonstration smart city projects but the new initiative will provide an umbrella program to encourage the sharing of information and the development of more public-private partnerships.

Like the Japanese government, the European Commission sees the development of smart cities as an important element in its climate change strategy and a way of bolstering its clean technology and smart energy industries. In contrast, the United States still lacks any cohesive approach to smart city development at a national level. Whether this is a sign of strength or weakness is an interesting question that we will to return to in future.

Photo by xiquinhosilva/flickr/Creative Commons

Eric Woods is an analyst at Pike Research who focuses on the smart grid and green information technology.

Welcome to the Anthropocene era, when human impacts begin to overwhelm those of other species. The implication, as long-term environmentalist Steward Brand put it, is that “Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.” Then provocatively, he argued, “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”

So where would you look for people – and industries – that are good at thinking through what it would mean to be a god responsible for looking after Planet Earth? Let’s put aside religions, which have tended to be more interested in the after lives of their believers than in the lives of future generations of humans and other species. So who then comes to mind?

For some people, the world’s financial centers will surface pretty quickly, but one of the best books I have read in a while offers a very different answer. Written by Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future, Reality is Broken argues that designers of online games – and those who play them – “have a head start on this mission.”

Civilization, for example, challenges players to guide different civilizations—the Aztecs, Romans, Americans or Zulus—from the start of the Bronze Age six thousand years ago through the Space Age to AD 2100. What all these games share is that they encourage players to take a long-term view, to apply ecosystems thinking (seeing the world as complex and interdependent) and run many experiments in the search for solutions. A more recent example is Red Redemption’s Fate of the World.

The sheer size of the online gaming industry is astonishing. In the US, there are over 180 million active gamers, each playing over 13 hours a week on average. Wrap in console and mobile phone games and there are more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 100 million in Europe and 200 million in China.

Young Americans spend over three times more time playing computer and video games than they spend reading books – and are getting pretty good at it, particularly collaboration. One gaming environment, EVOKE, is described as a “crash course in changing the world,” encouraging and empowering young people to begin tackling problems like poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, access to clean water, human rights and preparation for natural disasters.

There are finite games, played to win, and infinite games we play to stay in the game as long as possible. Sustainability, clearly, is an infinite game. And there are single-player and multi-player games, the second of these being most exciting in terms of social change. Aiming to achieve “epic wins,” players don’t just feel good – and the evidence suggests that generally they do – but are also inspired, by the right games, to do good.

At a time when natural resources are running out, the initiative and energies of gamers represent one of our greatest renewable resources—which potentially grow and evolve as we use them.

About John Elkington

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans, co-founder of SustainAbility, blogs at JohnElkington.com, tweets at @volansjohn and is a member of The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Advisory Panel.

Talkback Readers: Can games really make a difference? Tell us your thoughts on Talkback!

Photo by s.bann/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from CSRwire

American designers Laura Karnath and Carl Burdick believe that “designers can no longer design products which rely on energy and resources as if those things were limitless.” Their new laptop computer design, which the team calls “Lifebook Leaf” appears to be their attempt to show that a radical change in thinking needs to take place in the technology marketplace. The design employs the latest in solar cells, flexible OLED displays, and “advanced durable materials” to create a highly efficient, solar powered laptop which is “totally divorced from the infrastructures of the past.” The new computer design, which was created for the FUJITSU design award 2011 competition in conjunction with designboom, is reportedly one of over 1000 entries and has been placed on the contest’s shortlist for potential winners.

One side of the “laptop” is designed with a single OLED display that can be laid flat to function as a large display or bent at its midpoint to mimic a conventional laptop orientation. In this orientation, one portion of the display could be used as a screen, the other as a touch-style keyboard. The flip side of the device would be lined with solar cells that, when laid flat, would charge the device’s battery. The designers say that they hope advances in CPU technology would soon enable the laptop to generate enough excess energy to charge other devices via USB, too.

The computer would include a 4G adapter for wireless Internet access and three cameras located at the top of the screen that could capture 3-D images and facilitate a gesture interface which would enable the user to execute functions based on simple movements. The designers also added in a smaller OLED display on the solar side of the laptop to show charging progress, 4G signal strength and any alerts or messages that come through while the device is charging.

Other interesting design features include a rubberized interior to prevent screen scratches, a polycarbonate outer shell and a zippered edge that, in conjunction with the device’s shell, would create a water-proof seal.

Reprinted with permission from EarthTechling

If you have read some of my other blogs, you are probably aware that I have a passion for consumer opinions about clean technologies. When given the opportunity to choose a topic for blog entries, I often find myself perusing the results of Pike Research’s consumer surveys to find something noteworthy in how consumers view the various clean technology sectors that we cover. On more than one occasion, I have been fascinated by the differences in opinions that are revealed when results are segmented based on the various traits of the respondents. For example, why do older consumers favor nuclear energy so much more than younger consumers? Segmenting the responses to our survey questions by age, income, gender, and education level has provided us with some interesting insights into what factors are driving consumer attitudes toward clean technologies.

However, demographic segmentation does not always provide a compelling story. Increasingly, marketers are looking to behavior segmentation in order to define their target markets and tailor advertising messages. To bolster our own analysis of consumer opinions, Pike Research examined if certain behaviors could be indicators of attitudes towards clean technologies and other environmental concepts. Our survey was completed by a nationally representative and demographically balanced sample of 1,042 U.S. adults. Respondents were asked to provide their impression of each technology and concept using a scale of responses from “strongly unfavorable” to “very favorable” including options for “neutral” or “not sure / not familiar.”

Our theory was that a consumer’s willingness to invest in a new technology could be an indicator of how he or she viewed clean technologies. Therefore, we included the following questions and responses in our survey:

Please choose the statement that best fits you when it comes to technology products and services.

- I’m an “early adopter” of new technologies – I always like to have the latest thing
- I’m not on the leading edge, but I generally use new technologies before the majority of people I know
- I usually wait until a technology is more mature and widespread before starting to use it
- I’m generally one of the last people to start using a new technology

After segmenting the results based on the respondent’s answer to this question, our findings were mixed. For some of the technologies and concepts, there was no significant difference between the percentage of favorable responses from the total sample and from those identifying themselves as early adopters of technologies. These concepts included solar energy, wind energy, hybrid vehicles and electric cars, all of which were favored by a majority of the total sample. For many of the topics that did not receive a high percentage of favorable responses, early adopters of technology showed a significantly more positive opinion. The chart below shows the percentage of favorable responses for the total sample and for the “tech early adopters” segment for the topics where a significant difference was found.

While our theory did not prove true for all the topics we examined, it is worth illustrating how early adopters are more favorable on topics that are less favorable to the overall group of respondents. For many of these topics, the percentage of “not sure / not familiar” responses was greater among respondents other than early adopters. This indicates that this behavior segment tends to be more informed about clean technologies and environmental topics. The clean technology industry should take note of these results and look to this segment for input on consumer applications. In particular, utilities looking to implement smart meters and smart grid technologies would benefit from targeting these consumers for pilot projects and testing. Early adopters of technology represent a goldmine of opportunity for consumer-focused cleantech companies.

Photo by Andrew Hitchcock/flickr/Creative Commons

Brian Davis is a research analyst for Pike Research with a focus on smart energy and clean industry practices.

If you are committed to buying food that is produced locally and sustainably now you have more help in finding it. You can use your smart phone, tablet or computer to locate information about various regional foods, whether your goal is to find some fresh organic kale from a nearby farm, or to trace a tainted food product in the case of a contamination or recall.

The interest in mapping where food comes from and tracing the supply chain of food has resulted in some innovative web based tools that are creating transparency in the food supply. Some of these food maps are being built through citizen participation for data gathering, and the more people that participate the more complete and useful the maps become.

Redwood City California is home to HarvestMark, a business that has created a barcode system for tracing the origins of fresh produce. You can download the app for an iPhone for using the barcode directly, or by entering the code numbers into an Android to get information on a product; but this program relies on the producer’s participation. According to a recent article in Urban Farm Magazine, the company has over 200 customers representing over 2,000 farms.

Food Sprout is a company that harnesses grassroots participation to create their maps of sustainable food. Their ambitious mission is to “map the world’s food supply chain”. Their purpose is to help restaurants and food companies offer sustainable food, and to provide information for decision making about the food people consume. To contribute to the database you can create an account on the Food Sprout web site and enter information on your favorite products, such as the local suppliers.

Where Can I Find Braeburn Apples Locally?

Another food mapping web site is LocalFoodMap.Net. They use Google Maps to find farms and highlight them on your local map. Searching is done by entering keywords of the produce that you are looking for and your location:

Find: > Apples >Near Bendigo Victoria >Search

The listings for the produce will be placed on the map as icons, then you click the icons for details about the product, similar to searching for a restaurant. The results you get will vary in terms of how close to your area they are, but as more local producers enter their details, your results will become more localized.

What’s in Season?

Epicurious is a site popular with foodies for recipes and cooking tips. It also hosts an interactive Seasonal Ingredient Map that you can use to find what’s fresh and in season in your area, as well as useful recipes and cooking tips.

To research the sustainability status of your seafood when you are out and about, you can try the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program for your phone. The latest version has Project FishMap, which allows you to share the locations of restaurants and markets where you’ve found sustainable seafood. This is yet another example of a project that benefits from participation to build a successful result that benefits the community of users.

The internet is a ready source of great tools for green living, but my favorite “low-tech” way of finding delicious locally grown food is to shop weekly at the city’s local farmer’s market; another good local food option, which is even more sustainable, try your hand at growing your own food.

Reprinted with permission from Ecolocalizer

Google signed a second power purchase agreement (PPA) to increase the share of electricity it consumes in its data centers from renewable energy.

Under a PPA, companies sign a 20 year agreement which locks in electric prices.

Last year, its Google Energy subsidiary signed a PPA with a NextEra wind project in Iowa to buy 114 megawatts (MW) of wind for 20 years.

Now, they signed to buy an additional 100.8 MW of wind from NextEra Energy's Minco II Wind Energy Center in Oklahoma.

The company is buying wind energy from projects that are on the same grid as its data centers. Google is opening a center in Oklahoma this year.

NextEra (Florida Power & Light's wind subsidiary) is one of the largest wind developers in North America, with 85 projects in 17 states.

Greenpeace recently released a study, How Dirty is Your Data: A Look at the Energy Choices that Power Cloud Computing. It demonstrates that much of the energy fueling the Internet comes from fossil fuels, particularly coal.

"We need to pay attention to what's behind the curtain," the report says regarding the advent of cloud computing. "It's converting our work, finances, health and relationships into invisible data, centralised in out-of-the-way storage facilities or data centres. There are many positives to this, but are companies addressing this growing environmental footprint?"

Some conclusions:

Data centers to house the explosion of virtual information currently consume 1.5-2 percent of global electricity, and is growing at a rate of 12 percent a year.

Instead of powering factories with coal, we're not powering information technologies with coal. Over half the companies they rated rely on coal for 50 percent-80 percent of their energy.

IT innovations give us the ability to work from home with teleconferencing and telecommuting tools, stream music instead of buying CDs, etc. which reduce energy consumption. But dirty energy is fueling much of these innovations.

Of the 10 brands graded, Akamai, a global content distribution network, earned the top rank for transparency; Yahoo! had the strongest infrastructure siting policy; Google & IBM demonstrated the most comprehensive approaches to reduce their carbon footprint.

Besides Google, Microsoft is buying wind energy for its Dublin data center. i/o Data Centers is installing a massive 4.5 MW solar array on the roof of its 580,000 sq ft facility in Phoenix.

Next Generation Data in Wales says it's powered by 100 percent renewables through a purchasing agreement with SmartestEnergy (UK). In Iceland, GreenQloud runs completely on geothermal and hydropower.

Photo by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Business

I recently spent time with Intel hearing about its product and development roadmap for the next few years. Given that what Intel is thinking now decides the computer platforms on which we will be running much of our business in five years’ time, its view of the future carries more weight than most. It was somewhat gratifying therefore to hear that the direction we have outlined for the evolution of the green data center still looks correct. However, there were also additional insights into the new challenges facing data centers in the years to come.

On the server side, the pattern looks similar to recent years. Overall we will continue to see significant growth in bang per watt. Massive improvements in performance in recent generations of processor technology have opened the door to server consolidation and virtualization. Moore’s Law will continue to drive progress in terms of processing power and in processor efficiency. At the same time, further improvements in power management will help cap the power consumption of those servers. Intel will continue to extend the granularity of control available over power consumption of the processor. As new tools emerge to take advantage of these features, power management should become a common feature of the data center.

I wrote back in January about the growing interest in using large arrays of less powerful processors – like Intel’s Atom – for building more energy efficient servers. Intel’s approach is generally supportive of this strategy, where appropriate. That’s an important caveat. Intel is working hard to fill the gaps between the option for low power, low energy consumption processors, and high end, high power consumption options. It is not, however, a question of making this a binary choice but rather of extending the spectrum of options, so making it easier to choose the most appropriate balance between processor power and power consumption. When considering which is better, you have to ask, “Better for what?” For homogenous workloads that suit large scale parallel processing, the use of an array of low-end processors may well make sense. However, for heterogeneous workloads, a mainstream server processor like the Intel’s Xeon will still prove more energy efficient. The evolution of the processors as spelt out by Intel would see the gap between low-end, low-energy and high-end, high-energy options narrowed by improvements in the power of Atom processor and continuing improvements in the energy efficiency of the Xeon family. This should increase the options available and enable greater flexibility in choosing the right server architecture for the job.

Other discussions with the Intel experts reinforced the notion that storage and networking are the next areas of the data center ripe for energy optimization. One sign of how important Intel sees this development is that it has now integrated its storage and networking teams into its data center group. Better support for virtualization of the underlying infrastructure, in order to remove bottlenecks, and increased efficiency are the common elements of the strategy.

These developments all presume that cloud-based models will be increasingly accepted as the default mode of operation for data centers. But that doesn’t mean we have a settled view of the challenges ahead. Some of the most interesting discussions during the event covered the impact of the Internet of Things on the data center. Estimates for the number of intelligent devices on the global network over the next decade range from tens of billions to a trillion. What is not in doubt is that data centers will be supporting a vastly different client community in the coming years. Indeed the impact is already being felt. As we go to press, Intel reported a record set of quarterly results, with its Data Center Group showing a whopping 32 percent increase on 2010. This resurgence in data center investments partly reflects the growing demand to support a widening range of smart devices and cloud-based services.

As well as the inevitable further growth in data volumes this implies, it also raises new challenges in terms of flexibility, scalability, and security. This is not just about supporting smart phone clients. Smart devices in buildings, transport systems, homes and the power grid, for example, will drive the use of real-time data analysis and two-way communication across the network to support automated response systems. In turn this will put more pressure on data centers in terms of processing power and the adaptability of the infrastructure. Virtualization, cloud computing, and the drive toward energy efficiency are already re-shaping our concept of the data center. We also need to start thinking about how our data centers will support billions of new client devices.

Photo by NeoSpire/flickr/Creative Commons

Eric Woods is an analyst at Pike Research who focuses on the smart grid and green information technology.

Vehicles coming out later this year from Ford (Focus Electric) and Toyota (Prius Plug-in) will include enhanced telematics features that will enable drivers to comfortably make it to their destinations while consuming the minimum amount of electrons. Toyota is partnering with Microsoft so that its vehicles can communicate with Microsoft’s cloud technology, known as Windows Azure. Toyota’s Media Service division is peering into the home energy management (HEM) market and will enable its PEVs and their accompanying mobile applications to control electricity consumption in both the car and the home.

Ford, which has its own successful telematics platform in Sync (co-developed with Microsoft) that works with smartphones, recently added AT&T as a telematics partner for linking car data with mobile phones. Ford had previously focused on using the handset as the car communications platform, but the company recognized the advantage of having connectivity in the car and so has shifted its philosophy for the Focus Electric.

In addition the automakers themselves, telematics companies focusing on EVs abound, including Airbiquity, Automatiks, and Telogis, just to name a few. These companies are extending applications such as green routing to avoid traffic and energy efficiency for fleet managers.

This increase in the brain power could spell trouble for the makers of electric vehicle charging equipment (EVSE), who want their devices and not the cars themselves to be the center of smart vehicle charging. Many of the functions for smart charging – such as delaying a vehicle charge until off-peak hours, getting alerts about completed charging, and location data about charging stations – are redundant between a telematics system and the EVSE. Companies such as GE, Siemens, Ecotality, and Coulomb Technologies see the car-home connection as a great opportunity to expand the value of the equipment and are working on integrating their software with HEMs. They are ahead of the automakers in this regard today, but may not be for long if the major OEMs follow Toyota’s lead. GM, the granddaddy of telematics with its 15 year old OnStar platform, and Ford are both watching the HEM space to see how it develops.

For now, the momentum in the “Where will the intelligence go?” seems to be with EV telematics. Coulomb Technologies CTO Richard Lowenthal conceded during a recent conference that as EVs get more smarts inside, some functions such as smart charging may become redundant and unnecessary in EVSEs.

To talk about automobiles, electric vehicles, and telematics, I’ll be chatting with executives from Ford and GM as well as many others during a panel at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco on April 21.

John Gartner is a senior analyst at Pike Research and a co-founder of Matter Network.

GM (NYSE: GM) registered the most cleantech patents in 2010, knocking Honda (NYSE: HMC) from the top of the list for the first time since 2002.

2010 was a record year for cleantech patents in the US, according to the index published by law firm Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti P.C.

The Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI) reports 1,181 patents for the year, up by more than 170 percent over 2009 levels. That marks the largest year-to-year jump since the index began, and more than three times the difference between 2008 to 2009 figures.

The CEPGI tracks the granting of U.S. patents for the following sub-components: Solar, Wind, Hybrid/electric vehicles, Fuel Cells, Hydroelectric, Tidal/wave, Geothermal, Biomass/biofuels and other renewable energy.

Patents in fuel cells and wind power were each up more than 57 percent over 2009. Solar patents were up 134 percent while hybrid/electric vehicles were up 60 percent.

Tidal energy and biomass/biofuel energy patents were up 28 percent and 41 percent, respectively, at fourteen patents each. Hydroelectric patents were up 16 patents, an increase of more than 500 percent.

Geothermal patents was the only sector that decreased at five less patents than 2009--a 50 percent decrease. All of the technology sectors, except geothermal, were at all time highs in 2010, surpassing all previous records.

Fuel cell patents continued to dwarf the other components of the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index in 2010 with 996 patents, almost three times the number of patents of nearest competitor solar (363).

Patent Holders

Over seven hundred entities contributed to the total of clean energy patents in 2010. The top clean energy patent holders in 2010 were dominated by automobile companies, which occupied six of the top ten spots.

GM took the annual clean energy patent crown from last year's winner Honda. Samsung jumped to second place, largely on the strength of its fuel cell patents, overtaking Honda and Toyota (NYSE: TM) relative to 2009.

Toyota increased its annual total by 20 patents to get fourth place while GE increased by thirty to place in fifth. Nissan (6th) (NSANY.PK), Ford (8th) (NYSE:F) and Hyundai (9th) (HYMTF.PK) rounded out the automobile competitors for 2010.

GE (NYSE: GE) placed fifth predominantly on the strength of its wind patents which was over twice the number of patents of its nearest wind patent competitor in 2010, Vestas Wind Systems (VWS.CO).

Panasonic (NYSE: PC) came in 7th in 2010 to tie its 2009 showing on the strength of its fuel cell patents and exceeded the 29 patents from 2009 by five patents, after having had only 6 in all the prior years.

Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) rounded out the top 10 with 23 patents which were predominantly in the fuel cell and wind areas. Canon (NYSE: CAJ), far and away the solar photovoltaic patent leader since 2002, missed the top ten with a 12th place showing in 2010 at 15 patents.

Tying for 11th place in 2010 were Canon, Toshiba (TOSBF.PK) and Bloom Energy with 12 patents.

Photo by Ramunas Geciauskas/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Business

If electric cars are going to ever capture anything more than a tiny sliver of the U.S. auto market, not only does a robust EV charging infrastructure need to be developed, there has to be an easy way to find those stations. Until recently, there has only been a fragmented collection of maps, usually based on charging networks or business and association partnerships. But as of last week, you can now get the location of EV charging stations on the Google Maps platform.

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and using data from the Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center, you can now locate over 600 stations nationally by typing "EV charging station near [city/location]". The station locations are pinpointed and listed in the viewing pane to the left of the map, just like any other Google Maps search result.

In the U.S. all the search results we tested had phone numbers and were explicitly categorized as an "Electric Vehicle Charging Station," an official category that previously did not exist in Google Maps.  The locator also works in London, UK but not in the four other major European cities I tested.

"We’d like to continue adding more charging stations to Google Maps, so we’re excited that our friends over at the the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working to make more data available," writes Cynthia Yeung of Google's Strategic Partner Development Team at the Google Lat Long Blog. "We’ll be adding more EV charging locations to Google Maps as their database, and others, are updated," she writes.

The new EV charging station locator, which will obviously be accessible via smartphone (and especially useful if it has turn-by-turn navigation), was announced just two days after a California startup released an iPhone app called PlugShare that allows EV users to locate charging stations, both public and private, check their availability and also share the location of their own at-home chargers.

Another new project, Electric Car Stations, which also uses the Google Maps platform, feels and behaves more like a wiki, giving community members the ability to add/edit stations and updating listings with more information like photos, tips, hours, phone numbers, etc.

Reprinted with permission from Earth & Industry