In a letter published in nature, clean energy experts claim a 100% renewable future is within our grasp. They urge an immediate stop to building fossil fuel infrastructure.

A new piece of art decorating the outside of a London subway station makes a boring building look beautiful.

“Chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don’t know what they want to eat.” -- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential 

By 2050 there will be nine billion people on earth. And most of them are going to want a steak for dinner. More livestock will place an even greater burden on land, air, and water.

Rising meat consumption in China is now double that of the U.S., according to the USDA and Earth Policy Institute. 

A VC acquaintance recently mentioned that having a "fake meat" company in one's VC portfolio was becoming a must-have, like having a cloud computing firm or a failed thin-film solar company. 

Kleiner Perkins has invested in a firm called Beyond Meat, formerly known as Savage River Farms, which produces a plant-based chicken substitute. Other investors include Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams.

“We have to find a way to replace animals as a source of protein,” said Kleiner Partner Amol Deshpande in an earlier interview. “I don’t think the climate can subsist … with the amount of livestock that we have.”

A company backgrounder states, "We are really passionate about moving people to plant-based diets, because it is better for human health, animal welfare and the environment."

With technology licensed from the University of Missouri based on the work of Fu-hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, Beyond Meat has a heating, cooling, and pressurizing technique that allows plant-based materials to mimic the texture and mouthfeel of meat, according to the firm. 

Beyond Meat's product contains: "Water, Soy Protein Isolate, Pea Protein Isolate, Amaranth, Natural Vegan Chicken Flavor (Maltodextrin, Yeast Extract, Natural Flavoring), Soy Fiber, Carrot Fiber, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Dipotassium Phosphate, Titanium Dioxide, and White Vinegar." The mixture is processed and formed to approximate chicken.

The meat substitute is available in the prepared food section at Whole Foods supermarkets in Northern California -- so I ate some of the stuff, for this, our first food review at Greentech Media.

I found the Beyond Meat chicken strips absolutely as uninteresting as chicken. (Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian, so it's my memory of chicken I'm comparing it to.) The product sort of passes for chicken but the mouthfeel and "springiness" of the stuff are just a little off and a bit "mushy." It veers into the "uncanny valley" of very close but a little weird. I ate the stuff in a faux chicken salad, in a chicken curry, and plain atop a salad. The product was best under a thick sauce where it did not immediately betray its legume lineage.

Personally I prefer my soy, peas, and amaranth in their original non-extruded soy, pea, and amaranth form. I am puzzled by the need to go through heroic measures and processing to make grains mimic a bird. But if people are willing to substitute this stuff for livestock on their plate, the world might be more efficiently fed.  

The market for meat substitutes is worth $340 million, according to David Browne, an analyst at Mintel, a market-research firm that tracks these things. RTS Resource, another market analyst firm, sees "firm growth" in the meat analogue sector. Whole Foods sells a number of plant-based meat substitutes made from soy, grains, veggies, or mushrooms. I've had some of those, which often similarly fall into the Close, But No Cigar and Why Bother? categories.

Another alternative meat firm is Sand Hill Foods, rumored to be funded by Vinod Khosla and helmed by Prof. Patrick Brown of Stanford University. According to Nick Halla, the Director of Business Development's LinkedIn page, Sand Hill Foods is "combining cutting-edge science and product development to revolutionize the food production industry and make it more efficient and sustainable." The firm employs Chris Davis as "Director of Protein Development." Founder Patrick Brown mentions the goal of "Developing practical, constructive strategies for eradicating animal farming" on his LinkedIn page.

Going even further than working with beans and redesigned proteins is the work of Jason Metheny, Mark Post and others who are focusing on stem-cell grown or cultured meat grown in the lab -- a process that is still a bit further away from commercialization. A VC colleague argued, "I think the potential for consumer backlash is huge. It's one thing to develop a soybean-based meat product. It's another to develop a test-tube engineered protein." Mark Post suggests that cultured meat could be grown much more efficiently than livestock.

As KP's Deshpande said, “If you want to talk about agricultural land use, water use, [and] energy use, it really boils down to one thing: livestock. To me, if there is a place to attack the[se] problem[s], that is where I would attack it. Everything else is minor in comparison.”

Itron and Cisco have landed another smart grid project together -- and this one is on the doorstep to the world’s biggest future market.

That market is China, and the doorstep is Hong Kong, where utility China Light and Power Hong Kong has picked Itron and Cisco for a 4,500-meter pilot project. According to Monday’s announcement, the two will link Itron’s cellular-enabled meters and data collection and management software with Cisco’s grid routers and connected grid management system -- the latter, Cisco’s term for its grid network management system launched last year.

Itron and Cisco started integrating their technologies two years ago, and rolled out their first big customer, Canadian utility BC Hydro, last year. Since then they’ve added customers including National Grid, Duke Energy and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and have also collaborated on a powerline carrier (PLC) technology for European markets.

This is their first joint project in Asia, but not Itron’s first. In fact, the Liberty Lake, Wash.-based company has been working with Hong Kong’s CLP for some time as its meter data management software provider, integrating to the utility’s SAP back-end business platform, Philip Mezey, Itron’s new CEO, said in a Tuesday interview.

But the data from the utility’s 2.4 million existing electric meters are now almost entirely collected from register reads, he said -- in other words, utility workers walking around, reading meters, and typing in the numbers. With Cisco and Itron’s joint smart grid solution on board, CLP is now testing various business cases for bringing smart meter to Hong Kong customers, he said.

“We’re evaluating various business cases for two-way communications, and near-real-time communications, as well as consumer engagement,” including both single-phase (residential and small business) and three-phase (large commercial-industrial) meters, he said. Mezey, formerly COO and president of Itron, replaced CEO LeRoy Nosbaum (who rejoined the company eighteen months ago), to lead a round of restructuring in a planned transition.

Consumer engagement would play a large role in the project, Mezey said, though he didn’t get into particulars. Neither did he say whether or not Itron and Cisco were expecting their pilots to expand to full-scale deployments in the future. But he did note that the utility plans to upgrade most of its 2.4 million meters over the coming decade or so. That’s a big customer by any account, of course, on par with some of Itron’s biggest smart meter customers, such as Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Detroit Edison and CenterPoint Energy in the United States.

Still, it pales in comparison to the broader markets opening up in China. The country expects to need up to 300 million smart meters by 2016 or so, more than Europe and the United States combined. It’s all part of nearly $250 billion in grid investment expected in China over the next five years, as the country grapples with rapid growth and the rise of intermittent wind and solar power on the grid. (For more information, read GTM Research’s report, The Smart Grid in Asia, 2012-2016, Markets, Technologies and Strategies.)

But China has also made it clear that its domestic meter manufacturers will reap the lion’s share of this in-country deployment, with companies like Ningbo Sanxing Electric, Wasion, Hi Sun Technology, Linyang Electronics and Holley Metering lining up pilot projects, some of them reaching millions of endpoints.

China will also require cheaper, less richly functional meters for the bulk of its residential deployments. State Grid Corp. of China, the world’s largest utility, is targeting mass-market residential meters at about $50 apiece or less, compared to the $150-and-up ranges seen in North America and the $100-and-up for European smart meter projects.

Still, there’s plenty of room for smarter, and thus costlier, technology. Smart meter vendor Echelon has a joint ventures with China’s Holley Metering that’s putting its technology into Holley’s gear  -- a model the San Jose, Calif.-based company has followed in Southeast Asia and Brazil as well. In China, Holley’s utility partners are installing Echelon’s PLC smart grid networking technology into already-deployed “smart” meters that haven’t yet been connected to a network -- a virtue of the country’s separate tracks for metering and communications.

It’s likely that utilities will pick and choose high-value customers for such applications. Brazil is another country that wants its smart meters to be able to reach specific, high-value customers. Of course, many commercial and industrial meters have been networked for decades, first by plain old telephone lines (so-called POTS systems), and then via succeeding generations of cellular networks, all the way up to today’s modern smart grid offerings on tap from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and their European and Asian counterparts.

Itron is definitely exploring cellular communications for its Hong Kong pilot, Mezey said, though he added that Cisco’s IPv6-compliant wireless technology, now used to connect smart grid networks for all the partners’ projects, will also play a role in Hong Kong. The two are also looking at powerline communications in Hong Kong, he added -- a testament to the city’s high-rise landscape, where meters in basements may find it impossible to get a wireless signal up to apartments in the upper floors.

Interestingly, Itron is also using its 3G cellular modems, built on top of its acquisition of SmartSynch last year, in a partnership with Panasonic aimed at the Japanese market. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) plans to order about 17 million meters by 2019, and that’s drawn competitors including Panasonic/Itron, Elster, Silver Spring Networks and Japanese partner/investor Hitachi, and Toshiba, which bought Swiss metering giant Landis+Gyr last year. Beyond Tokyo, the country at large is putting smart grid spending in high gear to deal with its post-Fukushima disaster power crisis.

As for Cisco, it has been embedding its IPv6 wireline-and-wireless grid routers and switches in meters from Itron and Elster, as well as smart grid distribution gear from Alstom and Cooper Power Systems (now part of Eaton). Cisco has a deep set of smart grid developer partners, including OSIsoft for big data management, Proximetry for multi-communications network management, and Space-Time Insight for real-time geographic information systems (GIS), to name a few.

It’s all part of a growing trend toward integration in the smart grid field. Schneider Electric and OSIsoft are working on smart meters-as-grid sensors applications, as are Silver Spring Networks and big data management partner (and investor) EMC, and competitors such as Echelon, Elster, Landis+Gyr, Trilliant and Sensus. All will be targeting Asian markets at various price points. After all, if you include China in the picture, it’s the biggest market there is.