Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com

As rising global demand for electricity runs headlong into growing public concern over power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), the promise of a power grid as “smart” as a telephone or cable TV network is quickly becoming real. Led by efforts in Ireland, Australia, the U.S. and other countries, over $40 billion reportedly is being spent globally to bring to life a grid capable of two-way communication between power producers and users in order to minimize and optimize power generation and consumption – and the GHG that comes with it.

Meet Bill Vogel, chief executive of Trilliant Inc., a company in the thick of the smart grid revolution. Privately-held Trilliant is one of the companies expected to provide the wireless infrastructure – the mesh network – that will make today’s “dumb” power grid very “smart” indeed. Trilliant’s role will be to put the necessary chips together onto boards. “We’re going to be the Cisco of the energy market,” he said.

According to Vogel, within five years you will be able to use your cell phone or other personal communications device to remotely control and adjust the energy consumption of every power-consuming device in your home and office. You’ll be able to program a home meter much “smarter” than today’s programmable thermostats so that it “talks” with your electric utility, instructing your power firm whether, among other things, you would be willing to have it switch off the lights on a hot summer day when system overload threatens to cause a blackout. (You’d get paid for the inconvenience.)

To be sure, at least one major hurdle must still be overcome for this smart grid revolution to succeed. At present, U.S. electric utilities get paid only for the power they sell to their customers, not for the power they save their customers. New regulations are needed to, in industry lingo, “decouple” supply from saving, permitting a utility to make money by reducing its customers’ power usage.

With efficiency the only “quick fix” to the world’s energy problems, decoupling is likely to be adopted over the next few years. So EnergyTechStocks.com asked Vogel which technology companies other than Trilliant look well-positioned to benefit from what’s shaping up to be a huge need for computer chips and the meters, mesh networks and other key components of a smart grid that those chips will go into. The first thing investors should know about what Vogel said is that all this new business still isn’t being factored in to Wall Street analysts’ evaluations of technology firms’ sales and earnings prospects.

Among the chip players highlighted by Vogel were three publicly-traded companies – Freescale Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and Atmel Corp.. A private firm, Ember Networks, also featured prominently in Vogel’s remarks.

Boston-based Ember states on its web site that it has developed “the first network processor chip that has been designed for the low power, low cost mesh networking industry standards based protocol – ZigBee.” Ember most recently reported that its ZigBee networking technology is being used by a major wireless building management firm to control power usage as well as enhance building safety.

A Texas Instruments unit, the former Chipcom Group, is a key manufacturer of the chips that go into electronic devices, enabling them to communicate wirelessly via mesh networking from up to 100 meters apart.

Freescale Semiconductor, which was spun out of Motorola a few years ago, has predicted that by 2015 every person will have on average 1,000 chips embedded in the things around him, compared with about 200 today, 150 of which are in the home. According to Freescale, this increase will serve to make blackouts a thing of the past, while making every person’s surroundings energy “intelligent.”

Atmel is another key manufacturer. Earlier this month the company introduced a new transceiver for low-power wireless applications, including Zigbee.