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As GE’s $200 million open innovation challenge kicked-off in Europe today, GE also presented preliminary results from the “GE Innovation Barometer,” an independent survey of 240 Brussels opinion leaders on innovation policies in the European Union. With the EU placing innovation at the core of its 2020 strategy, and in advance of the publication later this year of the European Commission’s Innovation Strategy, the research was commissioned by GE to see how opinion leaders view the current state of innovation policies within the union. The survey found that 90 percent believe innovation is the main lever to create a more competitive and greener European economy. But while 86 percent of respondents believe investing in innovation is one of the best ways to create jobs in the EU, only 53 percent think that the EU is currently successful in directing its policies, resources and budget to support research and innovation.

Energizing innovation: When asked which sectors would most benefit from a more efficient EU innovation policy in terms of jobs creation and economic growth, 78 percent of respondents said the energy sector. Respondents represent an array of thought leaders from Brussels-based institutions, NGOs and businesses. The full report will be published in September. The research was conducted in April-July 2010 and combines both quantitative and qualitative data gathered through email and phone interviews.

The unveiling of GE’s new $200 million ecomagination innovation challenge and two smart-grid product launches grabbed the spotlight during yesterday’s clean-tech conference in San Francisco. But attendees also focused on one of the other critical elements — scale, and why it’s so important when trying to get new technologies adopted, especially in a mass, global market. As Ray Lane, Managing Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — one of the four venture capital firms in the new challenge fund — said during a panel discussion: “There’s 120 million residences, 20 million businesses, 3,300 utilities… and there’s another 1,500 independent power producers that all have to move in sync to solve this [energy and grid] problem. It is a scale problem and it is very difficult [for entrepreneurs] to think about new technology that you can demonstrate and then say, ‘now I’ve got a bigger problem: how do I scale it up?’”

As wind and solar power draw increased attention in the push for clean, renewable sources of energy, the question of how to integrate them into the power grid is also in the spotlight. GE Energy recently prepared a lengthy report for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — the Western Wind and Solar Integration Study — that took an in-depth look at the grid in the Western U.S. The report, one of the largest regional wind and solar integration studies to date, found that the system could handle a significant percentage of both wind and solar — 30 percent wind and 5 percent solar — but only if some new practices are adopted, such as improved weather forecasting and better utilization and coordination of existing grid infrastructure.

One of the biggest challenges in building-out the smart grid in the U.S. isn’t a technological one. Rather, it’s explaining just what the smart grid is and why it matters to everyday people — since making consumers more aware of their own energy consumption can change their behavior. It’s why GE Energy has been conducting a number of surveys to gauge public perceptions about the smart grid. In the latest one, a majority of Americans, 79 percent, say they would adjust their energy consumption habits and behaviors in the short term to effect change long term — quite possibly because most of them, 72 percent, believe that how they generate and use energy today could actually harm the economic growth of the country.

With Atlanta, Georgia hoping to become the “Silicon Valley” of the energy sector, state leaders, including Governor Sonny Perdue and Senator Saxby Chambliss converged on GE’s new Smart Grid Technology Center of Excellence to celebrate phase one of its development. The center, which will be completed this fall, will create more than 400 new jobs over three years — with more than 150 employees having been hired in the last six months. As speakers at today’s ceremony made clear, one of the biggest hurdles in building-out the smart grid in the U.S. is explaining just what those two critically important words mean. While the video below does run for a lengthy eight minutes, it nevertheless provides a crystal clear explanation of just why the smart grid is so important. It includes perspectives from a who’s who of grid specialists from Google, IBM, Harvard, University of Colorado, Duke Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Xcel Energy, CNT-Energy, National Grid, Pacific Gas & Electric, American Electric Power, The Economist magazine, and GE Energy. As Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute, says in the video: “We’re going to have a shift to lower carbon energy. That’s absolutely inevitable. The only question is whether it goes relatively smoothly and we have a managed transition to more renewables and more efficiency or whether we have a somewhat chaotic and unpredictable process.”