Balance of power.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Sixth Dimension Inc. - Brief Article

Solving California's energy crisis -- and keeping it from spreading eastward -- is going to take more than a simple on/off switch.

A truly efficient energy model requires the immediate exchange of information between producers and thousands of industrial and commercial users -- plus the ability to react to the information.

This is exactly what Fort Collins' Sixth Dimension Inc. makes possible.

The company's flagship product, the Intelligent Network (iNET), allows energy providers to link all of their technical assets through a Web-based network.

The iNET "can connect to different types of devices, any type of energy-generating, measuring, or consuming device," said Sixth Dimension President and CEO Sunil Cherian. "We have a distributed intelligence model where we push the intelligence down to the end nodes of the network." That's exactly where it needs to be for energy producers to implement efficiencies and for large energy consumers to make better, price-smart buying decisions.

"The energy market is very fragmented as it exists today," Cherian said. Once a utility gets NET up and running, the network can help move the market towards equilibrium between supply and demand, Cherian explained. In California's case, the problematic "supply-demand mismatch" can be countered by either building more generators or by better balancing generation and consumption.

Sixth Dimension's technology allows providers to alert their commercial and...