Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne has opened an Energy Management Research Centre (EMRC). “The facility will be pioneering in intelligent management of home energy use, and will be an international showpiece of technology, education, and collaboration,” says Professor Leon Stirling, Dean of Swinburne’s Faculty of Information and Communications Technologies.
The EMRC will contain an R&D centre, a demonstration and training facility, and a seminar and conference hall. It will feature energy conservation demonstrations showcasing energy efficiency technologies from Australia and around the world. The showpiece of the centre will be a 3D “tele-immersive” Energy Efficiency Demonstration Room that will be used to demonstrate the real-time impact of energy conservation measures and technologies. The centre will be located at the university’s Hawthorn campus.
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Swinburne has partnered with Danish-American residential energy management (REM) vendor GreenWave to open the centre. GreenWave has developed a range of REM products, including in-house displays (IHDs), energy monitoring devices, and an Internet energy management platform.
GreenWave does not sell direct to consumers, but intends to partner with energy suppliers to find larger markets for its products. Many of its senior executives, including CEO Greg Memo, and board members come from Cisco. Given Cisco’s interest in the REM market, and its track record of acquisitions, it would not surprise to see Cisco make a bid for GreenWave when the time is right.
Meanwhile, GreenWave has a beachhead in Australia with the EMRC at Swinburne. No deals with Australian energy distributors have been announced, but you have to ask yourself why a start-up REM company based in Irvine, Calfornia, with manufacturing operations in Singapore and marketing out of Denmark, would make the effort.
Expect to hear a lot more of GreenWave (or will it be Cisco?)
