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With the forgotten attachment reminder on you'll get a small alert like this if you try to send off a message that mentions attachments but does not have them.

To turn on this new feature you must opt-in through the Gmail labs settings menu.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

It’s not a perfect system. For example, if you say, “I’ve put the files in this e-mail” or “included in this message” it won’t warn you. Amit over at Puse 2.0 also noticed that the system managed to flub “here is the attachment” and “Attach a document,” so the phrasing is not an exact science. With anything like this there’s a careful balance between making the act of sending an e-mail sloppy yet simple versus precise and difficult.

There’s really nothing worse than sending out an important e-mail with mention of an attachment then forgetting to actually attach the file that goes with it. To that end, a brilliant new Gmail labs feature is an opt-in nagger that will give you a warning pop-up if you try to send without a file and have used the word “attached” somewhere in the message.

Without a doubt, the recession and lower oil prices are hurting many companies in clean tech, a situation likely to slow what has been a frenzied pace of innovation.

“In a lot of respects, the best time to start a company is in the middle of a recession, assuming you’ve got money,” he said. “Our target is to go to market when most people expect the economy to turn around.”

“We feel better that we’re in the efficiency business selling to businesses,” said Robert LeFort, the CEO of Ember, a wireless-networking firm that has shifted its focus to smart-grid products. “That’s better than putting something on the shelf at Wal-Mart, and hoping the consumer picks it up…It’s the lesser of two evils.”

Flight to quality

Certainly, being in the right industry helps a small company’s chances. While biofuels are closely tied to falling commodity and gasoline prices, products that save energy can appeal to cost-cutting businesses or utilities looking to make the electricity grid more efficient.

“This Wall Street meltdown is having effects on early-stage green-tech companies getting the money they need to grow,” said Jonathan Gorman, the manager of business development at Qteros. “There was a huge due diligence process, with outside scientists, as we looked for money, which they probably wouldn’t have done before.”

Les Fritzemeier heads up a tiny solar-energy start-up that most people have never heard of, Wakonda Technologies. But rather than worry about being steamrolled by the sliding economy, he feels like he’s in a great spot.

Consider Qteros, a young firm with a potential breakthrough process for making ethanol from agricultural waste, such as corn stover. One of its initial investors, ethanol maker VeraSun Energy, declared bankruptcy, shutting it out of any follow-on round.

Across the board, though, investors and entrepreneurs report that the valuations of green-tech start-ups–once considered in bubble territory–are going down, and there is a growing emphasis on having cash.

He’s optimistic about the future because demand for technology that reduces the cost of solar electricity will remain strong, even in a down economy. The company is trying to develop disruptive solar-cell technology by combining low-cost, thin-film manufacturing techniques with very efficient cells.

Nicholas Parker, executive chairman of the Cleantech Group research firm, said the difficulty in getting financing in the coming year will thin the ranks of clean-tech start-ups and, from an investment point of view, result in a “flight to quality.”

Like most people in clean tech, he’s eager to see the shape of the Obama administration’s energy and green-job initiatives.

In another case of Wall Street colliding with green-tech garage start-ups, one newly formed firm nearly lost an investor when he lost half a million dollars on the stock market.

“I say to potential investors, ‘We have a product in the field now and look at the customer base–the market risk is low,’” he said. “Knock on wood…So far, my experience, has been typical of normal times.”

Seeking new sources

As a result, green-tech entrepreneurs–after being lavished with money and attention for the last three years–need to get creative with how they fund their ideas.

(Credit:
Advanced Electron Beams)

As more bad economic news comes out seemingly every day, many predict that the best companies–with paying customers–are the ones that have the best chance of thriving. A number of successful companies, including Google and Cisco Systems, were founded during an economic downturn.

Advanced Electron Beams CEO Mitch Tyson said his early-stage clean-tech firm has not had to scale back.

“The continued emphasis on renewable energy and economic development from the incoming (Bush) administration may put additional support in place to accelerate our efforts,” Fritzemeier said.

Late last month, SunRun, which installs and finances consumer solar-panel purchases, secured a $105 million commitment from U.S. Bank, but it wasn’t as easy as it would have been a few months ago: one investor said getting a bank to sign on to a tax equity fund was like getting on “the last helicopter leaving Saigon.”

Other sources of money, including BP and George Soros’ fund, filled the void. But the added work–compounded by cautious lenders–strung the process out from six months to nine.

To a large degree, that’s simply because younger firms, in general, demand less capital to operate. Those green ventures most vulnerable are the ones that need late-stage funding–the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to build a biofuel plant or solar-manufacturing line, they said.

Advanced Electron Beams’ Tyson is out, trying to raise another $20 million to $25 million Series C round, and he’s gotten a commitment from existing investors and a good reception from others. The interest could well stem from the fact that the company already has customers using its product.

But investors and entrepreneurs say that so far, smaller
green-tech firms appear to weathering the storm the best, allowing them to continue developing new energy technologies.

Fritzemeier of Wakonda Technologies seems have gotten the timing right too: he was fortunate enough to raise money in July, before the financial markets’ meltdown.

“What’s out there is a level of nervousness in every business,” said Mitch Tyson, CEO of Advanced Electron Beams, which makes equipment to make industrial processes more energy- and water-efficient. “People still don’t have a good sense of where the bottom is.”

Likewise, few radical changes were expected to the iPod Touch celebrating its second first birthday, but the addition of the Nike+iPod software, as well as the slimmer design and cheaper price tag, should keep people interested in the device that Apple hopes will be the future of its iPod division.

Tuesday’s iPod event provided few surprises but reiterated Apple’s commitment to making the kinds of incremental changes to its iPod lineup needed to stay on top of the competition and to keep customers coming back for more. New colorful iPod Nanos and a cheaper iPod Touch introduced by CEO Steve Jobs will be the centerpiece of the company’s lineup for the holidays, which account for up to 40 percent of annual sales for iPods.

Overlooked among new iPods and dreamy surf-rock crooners was perhaps the most important announcement of the day: Apple believes it has fixed what might be its buggiest software release in years, the OS X 2.0. iPod Touch and iPhone owners will get a chance later this week to patch what Jobs himself called “lots of bugs,” such as dropped calls, dysfunctional applications, poor battery life, and interminable backups.

There are much more important factors than buzz for Apple’s iPod engineers and marketers to worry about if the iPod is to stay atop the mountain. Since no competitors are really pushing Apple to innovate at the moment, it’s incumbent on the company to motivate itself by designing compelling products that give people ways to enjoy digital media on the go while looking cool and ensuring that its quality control doesn’t suffer in order to stay on top of this market. Otherwise, perhaps some scrappy underdog could sneak up on Apple farther down the road.

When nearly three-quarters of digital-music listeners are walking the streets with your product in tow, when you have the ability to blanket the airwaves with your advertising, and when your competitors can merely match your advances, you don’t need to hit a home run every time.

They may not be revolutionary tweaks, but Apple continues to improve the market-leading iPod year after year.

So while there may not be anything earth-shattering that emerged from Tuesday’s event–other than the somewhat-surprising news that Jack Johnson is the top-selling male artist in iTunes history–there was certainly no clunker. Check out CNET iPod expert Donald Bell’s thoughts for more color on the new devices. Truly, few expressions of disappointment came from those outside of Wall Street, with its narrow-minded focus.

Apple has earned the luxury of making an incremental change or two to its iPods each year that don’t necessarily dazzle but do keep the train rolling.

When people love your product anyway, a good bet to keep them entertained is to make sure they are having fun.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

Apple appears to be taking that old adage to heart as it concerns its iconic
iPod lineup: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Over the past three or four years Apple has indeed written itself into future marketing textbooks with its penchant for special events that generate buzz, but the iPod is old hat. Almost seven years after the introduction of the first iPod, over 73 percent of all U.S. residents who want a portable digital music player choose an iPod, according to NPD figures presented at Tuesday’s event.

It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Apple can continue to be the tech darling of the 21st century without the kinds of buzz-generating events that propelled it to the position it enjoys today. Perhaps that’s true of the
Mac or the iPhone, markets where Apple is a relatively small player among giants. But event-related buzz is much less of an important factor when it comes to the iPod; at this point, few need to be persuaded that Apple has music-player design chops.

The new design for the iPod Nano doesn’t break as much ground as its great-grandfather did in 2005, but the return to a long and slim design aesthetic seemed at first glance more pleasing to the masses than the “fat Nano” unveiled last year. The addition of the
iPhone’s accelerometer to the new Nano makes watching video on the most popular iPod more inviting.

Click here for full coverage of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

Investors seemed unimpressed with the new iPods. But it was a supremely awful day for the stock market as a whole, and sell-on-the-news is the standard reaction from the market to an Apple event. Despite what you might have heard from certain pundits so adept at building men from straw, few onlookers who spend their personal and professional lives watching Apple expected anything crazy from this event.

This is no longer about a scrappy underdog company cementing its dominance of an industry–as Apple did in 2005 when it stunned people with the iPod Nano–or an outsider looking to shake up an established market, like Apple did in 2007 with the iPhone. Apple owns the music player market. Apple is the 800-pound gorilla of this market, and companies unassailed by competitors have less incentive to take bold risks: just ask Intel or Microsoft.

American cell phone subscribers are sending more text messages than ever, according to a recent survey released here Wednesday by the mobile industry’s trade association
CTIA. About 75 billion SMS text messages were sent in June, averaging about 2.5 billion messages a day, the report said. This represents an increase of 160 percent over the 28.8 billion messages reported in June 2007.

“What is particularly alarming about this industrywide rate increase is that it does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages,” Kohl’s letter said. “Text-messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.”

SAN FRANCISCO–Despite a 100 percent price increase over the past couple of years, SMS text messaging usage is exploding in the U.S.

The big profits and high price hikes have raised eyebrows among some lawmakers in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, sent letters to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint-Nextel, and T-Mobile USA, expressing concern over the 100 percent increase in texting rates since 2005.

The senator from Wisconsin suggested in his letter that the price hikes are related to industry consolidation, which has reduced competition and put more control in the hands of four major carriers. He also asked all four of these carriers to provide evidence of the factors that led to the price increases.

Short message service, or SMS, text messaging first became popular in Europe and Asia, because it was much cheaper to send these short text messages than make an actual phone call. In countries such as the Philippines, the cost of sending one text is less than one penny. And in Europe where cell phone users are still penalized with high roaming charges between countries, texting is still a more economical form of communication.

Despite the rising price of texting, U.S. subscribers are using the service more than ever. And the combination of higher prices and heavier volumes of text traffic are driving enormous profits for carriers. In fact, CTIA also reported Wednesday that data services, which primarily consist of text messaging service, generated $14.8 billion in revenue for the first half of 2008, or accounted for about 20 percent of total mobile carrier revenues. This represents a 40 percent increase over the first half of 2007, when data revenues totaled $10.5 billion.

But that’s not the case in the U.S., which has seen the price of sending and receiving individual text messages skyrocket 100 percent over the past two years to 20 cents a pop. Sprint Nextel was the first to introduce the new 20 cent per text message rate last year. And other major carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA, soon followed.

So what’s with the 100 percent price hike in two years? Well, there’s nothing that has changed in terms of the cost associated with delivering this service. In fact, text messages cost carriers very little to transmit. And when compared with what carriers charge for transmitting other data services, such as music downloads or surfing the Web, the text messaging rates seem exorbitant.

The new wave of price hikes came just one year after all the major carriers raised individual text messaging rates from 10 cents a message to 15 cents per message.

It will be interesting to see what justification the phone companies come up with for the price hike. But even though the price of the service has increased dramatically, the fact that usage is growing as quickly as it has suggests that the actual 20 cent per message price is not more than the market can bear. Of course, as a consumer it’s frustrating to have to pay more for a service that I know costs next to nothing in other countries. It’s also frustrating to know that carriers are making big bucks off a service that really costs them nothing to provide. I guess, at least for the moment, mobile operators have found themselves a goose that lays golden eggs.

Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen “games” to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental prowess, including memory, cognitive control, processing speed, and the all-important attention. As you play, your scores are tracked and grouped together in an progress chart that you can dig into and try to figure out what’s been improving–or what needs some work. Games will also let you know when you haven’t performed as well as you usually do by tracking your historical performance.

Earlier today I started out my brain-training session with a game called Bird Watching. It’s meant to track your attention, but it ends up being a very strange mashup of Nintendo’s Duck Hunt meets hangman, where the goal is to not only shoot a picture of the bird that pops up on the screen for half a second, but also remember the letter that flashes in the center of the screen. These letters begin to fill out the name of the bird, and it’s your job to guess before you’ve captured all the letters–a process that (hopefully) uses a number of parts of your brain.

At $80 a year, Lumosity isn’t exactly cheap when compared with Nintendo’s Brain Age series, but you don’t need to buy any extra hardware and the creators continue to add new games. There’s also a two-week free trial you can play without entering any credit card information.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

I’m a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don’t feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo’s hardware, there’s Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.

‘Speed Match’ was my favorite game of the bunch, forcing you to remember if what you're looking at is the same as what came before it. (click to enlarge)

You have various games to choose from. Seen here is ‘Lost in Migration,’ a game that challenges your cognition skills.

The real hook of the service is the stats tracking, which will keep track of your mental scores indefinitely and do analysis of your cognitive prowess based on how you’ve been scoring in each title. Like Nintendo’s Brain Age series, it gives you some of this information in a four-way chart, as well as plenty of line charts that hopefully are getting better each day.

The other games were not nearly as memorable, including one that has you type in the direction of the middle bird seen in flying formations (apparently to test reaction time), as well as a mine-sweeper-like game that has you navigate a garden to get to a flower while avoiding space aliens.

Following bird watching my heart rate went up about 30 beats with Speed Match, a game that pits you against a variety of symbols in the hopes of figuring out whether the symbol you’re looking at is the same one that came before. To navigate you simply have to use your keyboard’s arrow keys. It’s quite a bit more fun than Word Bubbles, another game that makes you type words that start with the three letters they give you. Scrabulous players will mop the floor with this one.

Cell phone subscribers in the U.S. are spending more on their wireless handsets, another sign that the smartphone revolution has arrived.

Another indication that smartphones are impacting the market is the fact that fewer U.S. cell phone subscribers are getting their phones free from carriers. The percentage of customers who say they received a free handset has decreased from 36 percent to 33 percent during the past six months. Carriers typically have offered discounts on some smartphones, but they have not given them away for free.

On average cell phone subscribers are spending about $101 on new devices. This is $9 more than they spent on handsets just six months ago, according to a J.D. Power and Associates survey released Thursday. This is the first substantial increase in the average sale price of mobile devices in two years, the consumer survey company said.

The study also revealed that more than 40 percent of respondents said style and design were the most important factors in selecting their phone. Only 25 percent said they chose their current phone because it was offered free. And 21 percent said they bought their phone because it was discounted. Only 17 percent bought a phone because of its variety of features and small size.

Sony Ericsson, which makes the Walkman music phones, ranked the highest in terms of customer satisfaction as part of the survey. LG Electronics came in second. Nokia, the worldwide leader in handset sales, still has much work to do in satisfying customers in the U.S. The company ranked near the bottom in terms of overall satisfaction.

Cell phone users also reported that they are keeping their phones longer. The average reported length of cell phone ownership is 17.7 months. This is up from 16.6 months in 2006. One main reason driving this trend is that as more consumers invest in more expensive devices like smartphones, they expect to keep them longer. A sagging economy could stretch this length of time even further over the next six months.

What’s driving this price jump? Smartphones and other feature-packed phones. Devices, such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s
iPhone, as well as music-enabled phones are gaining popularity. In fact, J.D. Power reports that smartphones make up about 6.3 percent of all cell phones sold today, compared to the beginning of 2007 when they made up only 1.7 percent of the market. Other market researchers have also noted a surge in smartphone growth. And because these phones typically cost more, they are boosting the overall average sale price. On average smartphones, which allow Internet browsing and a slew of other features, sell for about $208 while regular phones sell on average for about $58.

“As more customers start to upgrade to mobile phones that offer real-time connectivity and access to Internet content–particularly those offered by smartphone devices–we should continue to see the wireless handset price point rise,” Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and Associate.

So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.

It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I’ve seen, apparently doesn’t even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.

The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I’m not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That’s not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it’s hard to read much into the data.

To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it’s clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the “S”).

commentary

It is glaringly clear (and made doubly so by corroborating surveys) that in the war of the community Linux distribution, Ubuntu is king, with 46 percent of those surveyed on Ubuntu’s Gutsy or Hardy distributions, and 8 million to 9 million global installations. (I suppose the other way to look at it is that Debian is king, as it pulls in an additional 14 percent, beyond its Ubuntu descendants.)

This isn’t surprising, for a few reasons. First, among the other prominent Linux providers, Ubuntu has uniquely focused on the desktop. Novell’s Suse and Red Hat’s Fedora have also targeted the desktop, but in very different ways. For Red Hat, the traditional desktop is a bit of a lost cause. For Novell, it is an enterprise endeavor.

Ubuntu tops Linux distribution survey

Can Canonical turn this into commercial success? It remains to be seen, but in a conversation with CEO Mark Shuttleworth the other night over dinner, it became clear that making it one is a top priority for him and the Canonical team. It’s about freedom first, yes, but Mark is not one to shirk an opportunity to turn a good idea into a good business.

(Credit:
Open Source Census, 2008)

For Ubuntu, it is a primary focus, and its ease of use and work with IHVs demonstrates this.

The data on Ubuntu’s amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.

More mobile phone and applications news from CTIA 2009

Like fellow voicemail service YouMail, Skydeck’s service requires you to forward your cell phone number to Skydeck for the software to work. You’ll also need to download a small client to the phone so Skydeck can sync the address book and text messages. Skydeck’s voice-to-text transcription service in particular is what makes it a premium service whose pricing ranges from about $10 to $30 a month, and the price plan is what makes business users and prosumers Skydeck’s target audience. To its credit, Skydeck offers a free 14-day trial for anyone who wants to test it for themselves.

If you have a headset, you’re conveniently able to initiate an outbound call through your computer, though to your contact, it will look like you’re calling from your cell phone. Skydeck also includes a bidirectionally-synced address book that organizes contacts by how often you communicate, therefore doubling as a speed dial. Any changes you make online show up on your phone, and vice versa. Lastly, Skydeck’s telephonic powers can often find phone numbers for missed or blocked calls, says Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt.

Skydeck's in-box metaphor makes it intuitive to use.

Skydeck is a useful-looking mobile message management service that creates a comfortable way to read and respond to phones calls, voicemail, and text messages from the Web. It differs from similar offerings by providing a classic in-box interface online, complete with a reading pane, folders, annotation abilities, and tagging. Skydeck also builds in a visual voicemail service operated by SpinVox so you can read your inbound messages in addition to listening to them. A search bar at the top of the page that helps you quickly find phrases and messages–including content from those transcribed voicemails.

(Credit:
Skydeck)

His latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus has not only sold more than 2 million albums, but has continued to sell lots of copies long past its release date–this week, nearly a year after release, it’s still at No. 7. That’s almost unprecedented in this day and age, when top-selling pop artists (think Mariah Carey) sell hundreds of thousands of albums in their first week then plummet off the charts. Why the staying power? Some argue it’s because the hit single from the album, All Summer Long (which is basically a reworking of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”) hasn’t been available as a digital download on iTunes or anywhere else. If you want to own the song, the only way to get it has been to buy the full CD.

Bawitdaba da bang a dang diggy diggy.

Truck stop rocker Kid Rock has been one of the poster boys for the “ignore downloads” crowd.

That changes today: you can now download the entire Rock and Roll Jesus album–and Kid Rock’s entire catalog if you’re so inclined–through the Rhapsody MP3 store. The albums are also available to Rhapsody subscribers. You still can’t buy the single on its own, as Kid Rock considers himself an album artist and wants you to hear the full package. And still no iTunes, as Apple frowns on album-only sales. It’ll be interesting to see if digital availability has any impact on sales, or whether fans keep preferring the CD.

Pumped hydro, where water is pumped up a mountain and released as needed in a hydro plant, is also used, but its use is limited by the number of available sites.

One company tackling bulk storage head-on is General Compression, which is developing a wind turbine with an integrated air compressor.

Two markets for energy storage

A123 Systems, which makes batteries for plug-in hybrids and power tools among other devices, is actively pushing into utility storage with more than 100 people dedicated to the market, said Fulop.

“If you could take the wind power, store it in batteries, and discharge when the wind starts again, then that’s a fine application of storage,” he said.

Different types of batteries are competing for bulk storage as well.

“Buying power at night and then selling it during the day–something like that will happen maybe in 30 or 40 years when storage technologies are one-tenth the costs they are today,” said Ric Fulop, co-founder and vice president of business development at lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems.

The end game is to allow utilities to provide baseload power–meaning electricity during the middle of the day when demand is highest–with stored energy.

But moving megawatts’ worth of electricity around the grid like files on a computer is more theory than practice these days.

“I think we will see a lot of deployments in the next few years that will change how the grid works,” Fulop said. “Then we’ll see utilities jump on the bandwagon.”

But utilities are risk-averse, and power plants take 5 to 10 years to construct. As a result, Lux Research pegs the market at $600 million in 2012, growing at about 25 percent per year.

Earlier this year, grid operators in Texas had to shut down power to its customers because the wind died down momentarily, effectively cutting off supply from its wind farms, noted Lawrence Gelbien, vice president of technology at utility NStar.

The latest generation of concentrating solar power plants are being developed with integrated storage, in the form of hot water or even molten salt to deliver electricity after the sun goes down.

But as utilities try out new technologies for different uses, Fulop and others predicted that storage will start to take hold in a variety of ways.

Dizzying array of technologies

At the opposite extreme are companies pursuing the “bulk storage” market where power is delivered for more than an hour.

Challenges

But for all the promise of making the grid operate more like a hybrid
car, there are serious challenges, panelists said.

Utilities are showing interest in more options, but storage is still very much an emerging technology.

It’s targeting what’s called grid stabilization, or grid support, where warehouse-size installations of lead-acid batteries are the incumbent technology. That alone is a multimillion dollar market and will pave the way for different grid storage applications, he said.

“The market rules have to change to allow nongeneration assets to connect to the grid and get paid for it,” he said. “And to make the grid look more like a Prius, utilities need to change their mindset to make more efficient use of the generation system.”

Grid support is relatively mature at about $2.4 billion and growing at 3.3 percent per year, said Lux Research President Matthew Nordan.

Technology optimists say that wide-scale energy storage will change the face of the transmission grid and make wind and solar power more compelling economically.

They are also very capital intensive. To get around that problem, Beacon Power doesn’t sell its flywheel. Instead, it bids on power generation contracts and sells the electricity to utilities.

Another flow battery maker, VRB Power, is currently testing systems, including a 5-kilowatt, four-hour prototype in Florida.

In this scenario, utilities store electricity made from renewable sources or produced during off-peak times. Then, when demand for electricity peaks in the middle of the day, they could draw from the stored-up charge.

Gelbien said that storage units could be deployed in place of installing more “wires and poles” in a place that isn’t served with enough electricity to meet demand for only a few days of the year. Because storage devices are movable, they could be redeployed in other places after a few years as the need arises.

“There is an increasing gap between the growing demand for electricity and the availability of options,” said Julianne Zimmerman, chief marketing officer for General Compression. “With increasing shareholder resistance to new fossil fuel and nuclear plants, there’s a shrinking set of options.”

If only 10 percent of the installed wind power plants adopted large-scale energy storage, the market would hit $50 billion, according to Lux Research. That’s because electricity costs more for utilities to purchase and deliver during peak times.

Air is compressed and pumped underground into geological features like depleted gas wells or limestone caverns. There are currently two compressed air energy storage (CAES) plants in operation with a few others in development. But some utilities are seriously considering CAES.

With grid stabilization, kilowatts’ or a couple of megawatts’ worth of electricity are pumped onto the grid for a short amount of time, from a few seconds to under an hour. It’s used to match grid demand and supply to make generators run more efficiently or to ensure a steady frequency.

Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC’s cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing.

This part of the market, where companies are developing a range of technologies, from so-called flow batteries to compressed air storage, represents the biggest business opportunity in grid storage.

Flywheels are also a viable alternative. Flywheel maker Beacon Power earlier this month said it expects to have a megawatt-size machine, able to store 15 minutes of power, on the grid by the end of this year.

Ideally, a utility would be able to get money from a storage unit in multiple ways. One rural co-op installed a four-hour, 300-kilowatt storage system to offset peak electricity rates and to provide backup power to a nearby industrial company, said Matthew Johnson, director of business development at Gaia Power Technologies.

Regulations for utilities are written around power generation units, but not energy storage, said Matt Lazarewicz, vice president and chief technology officer of Beacon Power.

Batteries with different chemistries as well as ultra-capacitors, such as the ones being developed by secretive start-up EEStor, serve this end of energy storage, Nordan said.

A panel of experts, organized by the New England Clean Energy Council, earlier this week said that the utility storage field has enormous potential. But rapid deployment of storage devices is held back by concerns over technology risk and financial complexity.

Start-up Deeya Energy says it is developing a flow battery for grid backup power or to integrate wind and solar power that will be far cheaper than lead-acid, lithium-ion, or nickel-metal hydride batteries and cheaper than fuel cells. Its products will be able to delivery between 2 kilowatts and 2 megawatts of electricity for 2 hours or up to 24 hours, it says.

This “peak shaving” practice avoids the need to build new power plants to meet growing demand. Utilities could also idle dirty and expensive “peaking plants,” which are only turned on during times of high demand, such as very hot summer days when air conditioners max out the load.

Rising fossil fuel prices are an incentive to explore energy storage, as well as the rising costs of constructing new plants.

Many of these technologies don’t have a 15-year track record that utilities like to see, which makes them skeptical. Large-scale battery projects requires systems integration that involves batteries, electronics, software, and thermal management systems, said A123 Systems’ Fulop.

So-called flow batteries, where liquid chemicals move between huge storage tanks to deliver a charge, are also being tested on the grid.

“There’s a lot of technology development and new work. But one of the reasons we don’t see more of it today is because the economics of this are actually quite complex,” said Bruce Phillips, director at Northbridge Group.