Smart power grids, energy efficient buildings, and environmentally friendly data centers are key areas of focus for Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)'s power and utilities industry division as it looks to help partners and customers tap into the forthcoming federal stimulus funding.

Microsoft has been working with utilities organizations on energy efficient projects for some time, but these efforts have moved slowly because of the conservative nature of these organizations. However, the urgency with which energy related stimulus projects will be pursued have awakened utilities to the technological challenges they face, and they're looking for recommendations.

The coming spike in demand for energy, coupled with the growth of stimulus fueled infrastructure projects, is going to create unprecedented amounts of data, and Microsoft believes its data warehousing technologies are tailor-made for crunching the data and delivering actionable information to customers, said Jon Arnold, managing director of Microsoft's worldwide power and utilities industry division.

When it comes to smart power grids, Microsoft prefers to focus on the "energy ecosystem" as a whole. The goal is to weave intelligence into the entire energy value chain, from the generation of power, to transmission, distribution, and metering, and all the way into the home, said Arnold.

"It's all about smarter systems and better communication and more information for analysis," Arnold said.

Utilities have access to huge amounts of data, but they've traditionally found it difficult to turn it into useful information. As the volume of data continues to rise, more utilities are deploying smart metering technology, and business intelligence provides the heavy lifting behind the scenes, according to Arnold.

"With sensors, there is a lot of data you need to turn into information, and you'll typically see SQL Server throughout the value chain," Arnold said.

Microsoft also provides a platform that allow utilities to look at data streams and discern what's important and not, which is known as complex event processing. By capturing data from system-level, application-level and external events and translating them into patterns, complex event processing gives utilities better insight into what's happening on their networks.

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