At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — IEEE — announced the formation of the Power Matters Alliance.

EV-related consortia and alliances are bubbling up like alphabet soup. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) announced the formation of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA), whose mission is to develop standards for delivering power and energy services to consumer and automotive electronics systems.

A new suite of standards called Power 2.0 will reference existing standards and define gaps that new standards will address, covering areas such as wireless charging, mobile computing, smart batteries, household power and power in public places. Group members include Duracell, Facebook, Google, General Motors and Powermat.

"The Power 2.0 specification will enable developers to create applications and services atop our wireless power platform," said Chris Thibodeau of GM. "We look forward to working with the rest of the industry to ensure that Power 2.0 becomes the standard across the automotive sector worldwide."

"The PMA could open the door for managed power," said Bruce Nordman, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We can reinvent our electricity from the bottom up, with nanogrids for a system architecture modeled on Internet principles so that a table with embedded wireless power could act as a nanogrid, and so can a car," he added.

Image: HaloIPT