I was in San Francisco last week for Oracle Corp.’s 2009 edition of OpenWorld—me and approximately 40,000 other people.  Oracle bills OpenWorld as the world’s largest technology conference and I’m certainly not going to argue with them.  There were some 1,900 presentations and huge demonstration floors, displays, booths and speakers spread over the three massive buildings of the Moscone Convention Center, plus several other venues.  Most of the utility-specific sessions were at the Palace Hotel, two or three (long) blocks away.

Obviously, it’s impossible for one person to cover much of that—or several dozen for that matter.  However, since Oracle is one of the very largest players in the utility industry, I did the best I could.  In the process (and with the aid of Oracle’s ever-efficient analyst relations staff), I was able to pick up several interesting things pertaining to utilities.  Some of these nuggets include:

·        Oracle’s Global Utilities Business Unit is in the process of redeveloping a number of its utilities-specific software systems, notably MDM and Mobile applications.  This redevelopment process has a code name I don’t think I’m supposed to know, but from what I was told, Oracle is addressing a number of the rapidly evolving requirements of smart grid in this process.  Expect to hear more about this hush-hush project in the near future.

·        Austin Energy is known as a leader in the smart grid arena.  However, even one of the leaders still has some ways to go before extending smart grid to all customers.  Roger Duncan, general manager, says there now are 90,000 homes in Austin with programmable thermostats.  However the utility still doen’t have remote turn-on, turn-off with many of them—the University of Texas being one notable exception.  Duncan says “buildings” will be the main focus of energy issues in the future—making them more energy efficient.  “The old paradigm is changing and everything comes back to buildings,” he said.  He also noted that “most utilities don’t have real-time pricing structures, so savings are going to be limited.”  He says until real-time pricing becomes more widespread, utilities can do only so much toward limiting energy use.

·        Oracle is working with San Diego Gas and Electric on a very interesting “micro grid which involves not only conventional generation but also some renewable.  We’ll be following up on this one in more detail later.

While OpenWorld is huge and you can’t begin to absorb everything, it is possible to concentrate in certain areas and pick up some interesting nuggets.